The Vacuum of Space Won’t Last Forever. In Fact, It Ends Much Sooner Than We Thought.

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The Vacuum of Space Won’t Last Forever. In Fact, It Ends Much Sooner Than We Thought.

Eventually, the vacuum of space will decay, and things will fall apart—in a zillion years.

Our universe is glued together by quantum fields, like the Higgs, which set much of our physics.

Revising this lifetime down by 10,000 years is a small drop in a very enormous bucket.

In new preprint research, scientists in Slovenia have adjusted a calculation to determine how long we have before the

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decays. While this date is still an extraordinarily long time into the very, very far future, our math model to determine it is loose enough to invite more questions than answers.

It’s intuitive that we struggle to nail down the far future this way—it’s honestly more amazing that we can estimate the date at all. So, how do scientists do it?

Matt von Hippel

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for Quanta. Our universe is filled by quantum fields, many of which are empty or zero. One, the Higgs field, is not:

“Called the Higgs field, it controls the mass of many fundamental particles, like electrons and quarks. Unlike every other quantum field physicists have discovered, the Higgs field has a default value above zero. Dialing the Higgs field value up or down would increase or decrease the mass of electrons and other particles. If the setting of the Higgs field were zero, those particles would be massless.”

The decay of the vacuum of space will occur if the Higgs field tunnels, like skipping the line, to a higher overall energy setting. Our universe has an overall equilibrium that will shred apart if everything suddenly becomes heavier or lighter on the particle level. It’s a macro version of what would happen on Earth if our gravity suddenly changed a lot. Everything in our bodies, and those of every living thing on the planet, has evolved inside that specific gravitational context. When you pull deep sea creatures up to the surface, they can explode.

In quantum mechanics, almost nothing is a certainty at a particular time. Like the nuclear half-life of a compound, decay of our spacetime is something that happens in a quite random-looking way, over a very long time, based on complex math and particle interactions. In this case, the decay is caused by tunneling—skipping the line—and there’s a rate at which tunneling occurs. It’s complicated, and for any given day or week or year, it’s probably a decimal point followed by at least ten thousand zeros and a far-away one.

In 2018, physicists ***** out what they said was the first concrete estimate of the timeframe for universal decay based on quantum tunneling:

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, which is well over a googol. And in the last six years, others have iterated this number by considering how to formulate it. How certain or uncertain are different parameters involved? Which ranges can we reliably estimate? These are questions more of likelihoods and ranges than of single concrete values.

The most recent peer-received estimate is 10 to the 794th power. The largeness of these numbers can be hard to really grasp, making them seem similar—but that current estimate is as if you raised the first estimate to almost the 6th power itself. That’s the transformation between 2 and 64.

All this brings us back to

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from Slovenia’s Jožef Stefan Institute, the largest public research institute in Slovenia and, before that, part of Yugoslavia. In it, the physicists take issue with one coefficient in the overall math model of universal vacuum decay and the lifespan of the Standard Model. That coefficient relates to gauge, which is a quality that fields like the Higgs have, affecting which calculations apply to them and in what ways. One portion of that was calculated to be higher than it should be, the Slovenian physicists explain, which means the overall life of the vacuum in their opinion is 10 to the 790th power. That’s 10,000 years sooner, but that’s an almost unfathomably tiny fraction of the overall number.

In other words, as the researchers conclude, “The SM vacuum lifetime ******** longer than the current age of the universe, and there is no occasion for anxiety.” How reassuring!

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