I’m noticing a trend of scientific-sounding announcements about physics results that turn out to be theoretical explorations of simulations. The whole “false vacuum” idea isn’t really even a hypothesis, just a what-if. We have no indication that the ground vacuum state isn’t the lowest energy configuration. I think people just find a non-zero minimum unintuitive.
Anyway, the key figure in all these theoretical simulation articles is the multi-billion dollar quantum super computers running these simulations. Wouldn’t it be funny if tech investors with a lot of money staked on quantum devices pushed for low-quality science that required their machines to be done, thus expanding the market and value of their otherwise pointless supercomputers? This article ends on a very optimistic “these computers have so many uses in cryptography and science” which seems a little out of place when discussing physics results.
Very cool. Please don’t start a chain reaction while researching it. I’m not terribly fond of humanity but most of the rest of the stuff in the universe seems pretty neat.
Don’t worry, if anyone was going to collapse the false vacuum it’d probably have already happened.
Yeah but see, there’s that ‘probably’. 😉
And at the center of origin of each of the true vacuum bubbles was an advanced civilisation that one day started a “totally safe” physics experiment…
