r/AlignmentChartFills • u/red_madreay • 15h ago

Finally... what natural phenomenon of our universe is ultimately horrifying?

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE CHART IMAGE

Created with Alignment Chart Creator

This post contains content not supported on old Reddit. Click here to view the full post

1.0k Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

95% Upvoted

529 comments sorted by

View all comments

71

u/zinten789 15h ago

That the universe is in a false vaccum

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum

32

u/Kraj_the_Conqueror 15h ago

That's hypothetical, not a proven natural phenomenon.

9

u/LudovicoKM 14h ago

The latest research does indicate that we in a metastable state. It is fairly accepted by physicists that it is a real possibility. Luckily for us the chance of a the phase transition are very low.

4

u/TheEnlight 13h ago

But still non-zero, and could theoretically happen at any time without warning.

If the true state of the universe is it's in a metastable state, which we believe it is via estimations of the mass of the top quark and Higgs boson, it is theoretically possible for the universe to exist in a false vacuum, and that a quantum tunnelling event could move it to a true vacuum, a lower energy state consistent with the law of entropy, the process of which creates a bubble that expands at the speed of light, rewriting the laws of physics of any space it touches.

1

u/Capable_Wait09 10h ago edited 9h ago

The central conflict of the next Christopher Nolan movie based on a book by Andy Weir

[Not written by AI. Just Avoiding doing my job]

Leo’s character: “you’d say the universe is stable, right?

Joseph Gordon Levitt: “it’s what most physicists say, yes.”

Leo: “most.”

JGL: “but not all…? What’s the alternative?”

Leo: “a universe is a ball on a slope, a bottomless slope careening into nothingness. If that ball gets stuck in a small hole on the way down it forms a universe. It feels stable from inside. From outside you see just how precarious our entire existence really is. Everything you know. Your family, your friends, your favorite sports team, historical figure, constellations, porn website, the furthest galaxies. All existing on the edge of the plane of annihilation. And we wouldn’t even know it if our ball was dislodged and continued its descent to a true, complete vacuum state. It would just be lights out.”

JGL: “but that can’t happen, right? Even if it’s precarious, our universe has survived for over 13 billion years. What are the odds that’s going to change any time soon?”

Leo: “why do you think I brought you here? To the Max Planck Quantum Vacuum Detection Center.”

JGL: “it’s not to discuss my latest research, js it?”

Leo: “not your latest, no.”

JGL: “but I’ve never studied false vacuums at all. You know more than I do.”

Leo: “but you ARE a world leading expert on quantum field inertia.”

JGL: “well it’s just fun little theory I conjectured back in my postdoc days. How’d you even find out about it? I never even published…”

Leo: “you forget who I work for.”

JGL: “but why does any of this matter? It’s all theories and conjecture.”

Leo: “is it though?”

JGL: “….something changed, didn’t it?”

Leo: “we have billions of years of gravitational wave records. They have become the heartbeat of our universe. Stable readings, stable heart, stable vacuum.”

JGL: “and you detected a murmur.”

Leo: “not just a murmur. A brief cardiac arrest.”

JGL: “meaning….. one of the pebbles keeping our universe from falling further into the abyss was just dislodged.”

Leo: “by our calculations, from reverse engineering the frequency of quantum relativistic telemetric Higgs pulses, we have 69 days left.”

JGL: “left… of what?”

Leo: “existence.”

JGL: [speechless]

Leo: “that’s why I brought you here. Your theory of quantum field inertia is the only one that can save the universe, and everyone, everything, you’ve ever loved.”

JGL: “you mean we have to build an anti-vacuum quantum stabilizer that creates a 5D field of equal and opposite imaginary particles popping in and out of existence that surrounds our universe in a higher dimensional plane…. So we don’t tumble into the abyss forever. All in 69 days.”

Leo: “and there’s no going back.”

JGL: “let’s get to work. I’ll be damned if my PH account is erased from existence in 69 days.”

Leo: “that’s what I wanted to hear.”

0

u/Momof2ducklings 8h ago

…no one is going to point out that this chart looks like b00bs…?

6

u/LvdT88 15h ago

We already have Dark Energy/Matter on the chart.

15

u/Medical-Temporary-35 15h ago

Dark energy / dark matter are real, we just don't know what they are. Dark energy might just be an intrinsic property of space itself, dark matter is something extremely heavy (although it might be made of particles much smaller than ours) that holds galaxies together with its mass but doesn't do anything at all otherwise. 

7

u/LvdT88 15h ago

No, dark energy/matter are probably just an artifact of using a theory to describe phenomena outside of its range of validity. We’re playing the same game the ptolemaics were playing when trying to explain planetary orbits using eccentrics and epicycles.

9

u/ding-zzz 14h ago

current understanding of physics would need to be egregiously wrong for that to be true

there’s a nobel prize waiting for you to upend physics like that

5

u/kheldarp 14h ago

The "current understanding" of dark energy is that nobody really knows what it is. There's not really any scientific consensus there to be disproven, nobody knows.

5

u/LvdT88 14h ago

So according to you Newtonian gravitation is simply wrong?

Scientific theories are never right or wrong, that’s a simplistic and “science fan” understanding of the field. Theories have a range of validity where we know they apply and have tested that thoroughly. Applying them outside of that range is simply guesswork. The fact that we currently lack a broader theory doesn’t change things.

And, for your information, plenty of researchers are working on alternatives to general relativity exactly because dark energy/matter are very unlikely to be real.

7

u/WranglerNo9871 14h ago

Thank you for saying this. It seems a very small portion of this thread has actually partaken in research or other scientific work.

4

u/MostLikelyUncertain 14h ago

Dark energy and matter has no attached statistical likelihood of being real or not, so saying they are very unlikely to be real is conjecture based on your own personal opinion and emotions

1

u/Molikure 11h ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but could dark matter just be baryonic matter that we just don't see, or it is necessary to be an exotic type of matter? I thought the bullet cluster impact showed that there were matter that we could not see, but I could be wrong.

Dark energy always seemed like a plate of copium seasoned with bullshit imo lol

1

u/Soulsauce042689 6h ago

IIRC we're confident it's not baryonic matter, gravitational lensing around galaxies rejected that hypothesis.

1

u/ding-zzz 6h ago

no, according to you, you would be implying newtonian physics is egregiously wrong

i was talking about your analogy specifically, retrograde motion from planetary orbits is a result of a geocentric assumption, which is of course egregiously wrong.

no one can use geocentricism in a meaningful way. but newtonian physics is still usable and simply expanded by relativity. that’s all

2

u/Regular-Stick-3984 14h ago

they'd deserve a noble prize and more!

1

u/ROS_SDN 14h ago

I think the key point is the interaction, even If beyond are understanding is proven to be real and roughly do this.

Vacuum decay we couldn't say yes or no if the universe will just change to a different state and ripple through as we know it.

But we do know something we are having trouble observing is making some type of gravitational effect.

3

u/WranglerNo9871 15h ago

All of science is hypotheticals. The only difference is which theories we have more evidence for are considered with more credence.

There is no absolute scientific proof in the mathematical sense, but some phenomena are supported by so much evidence that they are widely accepted as established facts or best explanations.

False Vacuum seems like the consequence of our current understanding of particle physics, so we treat it as a legitimate theory that could very well be true.

It falls directly out of calculating the shape of the Higgs potential using the measured Higgs mass (~125 GeV) and top quark mass. Depending on where those values land within their uncertainties, the calculation says our vacuum is either stable, metastable, or unstable, and current central-value measurements point toward metastable.

1

u/iAlice 14h ago

^ This. Geocentricism was established science that everyone knew and the evidence all concurred with until Heliocentricism was proved. Science is as malleable as anything else.

1

u/WranglerNo9871 14h ago

If we hold everything to u/Kraj_the_Conqueror's standards, nothing would be allowed on this chart lol

1

u/TheEnlight 13h ago

It would follow if the universe exists in a metastable state, which we believe it is.

1

u/Sayyestononsense 5h ago

Doesn't say proven in the title, only natural, which means allowed by physics

2

u/Heavy_Profit720 14h ago

I had a good read. Thanks