According to IDW’s Star Trek: Lower Decks #3, Ryan North and Jack Lawrence, USS Cerritos encounter an abnormality with the power to destroy the known universe itself. Long-term franchises tend to increase the dramatic stakes of their stories over time, and after several galaxy-threatening events at the Star Trek Show over the past decade, we are now cosmological It appears they are working on a meaningful event.
Cerritos’ long-range sensors detected a non-existent star. Upon closer inspection, the crew discovers a rapidly expanding area of ”vacuum collapse.” This is the collapse of the minimum quantum energy state. Does it sound harmless? Well, as Captain Freeman said, “Metastable shifts inevitably rewrite basic forces and cosmic constants, causing the complete collapse of matter as well as life.
Is this kind of extreme event possible scientifically? Surprisingly, yes!
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The quantum Higgs field that gives the mass of the particles can be in a “metastable” energy state. There it exists above the true minimum energy level. Only the potential energy barrier prevents the field from collapse into its low energy state. This means that highly energetic events can acquire parts of the field on the barrier and downwards to a new minimum state. In doing so, the collapse spreads outwards from the event at the speed of light, eventually swallowing the space in all directions.
Astrophysicist Katie Mac breaks down vacuum in the potential end-of-universe catastrophe of her excellent 2020 book, The End of Everything: (Astrophysivally Sakeink). She compares the prospect of vacuum decay (as the early universe breaks when it cools down) to the phase change of water.
“Imagine steam as a Higgsfield. The energy field is present at every point in space. And at some point, Higgsfield is completely dramatic, as the vapor condenses into liquid water. Imagine changing. If you’re used to encountering nothing but moist air, moving through a pool of water is a completely different perspective. When the Higgs field suddenly changes character , it was as if the laws of physics were condensed into a completely different shape.”
Our best measurements in the Higgs field indicate that our universe is indeed a metastable state. Mac continues:
“What’s wrong with being in a false vacuum? Perhaps it’s all. A false vacuum is at best a temporary reprieve from the ultimate destruction. In a false vacuum, the ability of particles to exist at all. The laws of physics, including: are conditional on unstable balancing acts that can be upset at any time.”
If the outlook for this is worrying about you, then it shouldn’t. There is no way to see it coming, as the bubbles of quantum annihilation strike us at the speed of light. Furthermore, if a very high energy cosmic event could cause it, it would have already happened. The supernova is exploding, the black holes have been merged for billions of years, and have not collapsed vacuum to date.
A similar speculative idea of true ground energy is the idea that the importance of neutron stars can be tightly pushed under immeasurable density and enter a lower energy “strange matter” state It appears in astronomy about. This causes the quarks within the neutron to be combined with continuous nuclear material (not individual nuclear particles, neutrons, and protons) at critical density.
If this is the true lowest energy state, the entire star will effectively become a single core! Elsewhere in fiction, Kurt Vonnegut’s cat cradle features “Ice Nine.” This changes the freezing point of water and instantly solidifies the liquid body. However, unlike any of these phenomena, the growing vacuum collapse catastrophe is not constrained by adjacent problems that could wipe out the entire known universe.
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It is unfortunate that this phenomenon does not point out that in the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, “Remember Me,” it has the parallels of the famous Star Trek. . As the episode unfolds, the universe sphere around her shrinks, and the crew members from far away mysteriously disappear, appearing until she is the only one left. Ultimately, the universe itself is barely bigger than the corporation. The grinder finds itself, lays corners with a corrupt bit of curved space, the slow and claustrophobic reverse of vacuum collapse.
Part 2 of this story, Star Trek: Lower Deck #4, tomorrow we’ll look into whether there’s a Wesley Crusher on the other end of the question. Perhaps you’ll see a brave crew resolve a truly unsettling catastrophe.
AIPT Science is presented jointly by AIPT and New York City skeptics.
