Vacuum Decay: The End of the World May Have Already Happened
It comes in the night. Or in the day. It doesn’t really matter. A wave of destruction washes over the Earth like a light-speed tsunami from the depths of space. Before it, life is as normal, but in its wake the very laws of physics are changed. Forget survivors, chemistry as we know it is now fundamentally impossible, let alone life. Humanity, our home, and any trace of our existence is wiped out in a fraction of a second.
While this scenario sounds like the opening to a 1950s B movie, it is a very real possibility. Should the universe undergo a process known as Vacuum Decay, it could unleash an unstoppable bubble of doom that could mean the end of everything we have ever known.
To understand this threat, we must travel to a miniscule fraction of a second after the Big Bang. The universe is tiny, and unbelievably, insanely hot. Under such conditions, it is thought that the fundamental forces — electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear interactions and gravity — were unified into one, universal interaction. As such a time, we could have described behaviours as diverse as an apple falling from a tree to the decay of a uranium nucleus with a single set of equations, had apples, trees or uranium existed.
Such a state of affairs can only exist under the most extreme of temperatures (which is…
