/sci/ - Science & Math

>>12422372
> what sets the terms of this wall?
It's called a false vacuum. iirc it arises due to the fact that the Higgs is a scalar field.

> what could cause it to roll where things get bad for us?
*shrug* the most common suggestion is that it could quantum mechanically tunnel through the wall (energy gap) but the odds of that happening are really really really small.

How do we deal with the false vacuum problem?

>>7052132
Basically the Universe is not in the state with the lowest possible energy and could potentially inhabit a state where it is. These energy states are separated by an energy barrier, meaning that you have to expend energy to cross it. Thats why we assume that the universe is in the lowest energy state.

If this barrier would be crossed (either by additional energy or by tunneling) this would release energy which would mean that the surrounding space would also fall into that state. This would then continue until all space is in that energy state. Because the Universe would have a different energy the laws of it would be so different that we could not survive in it (presumably) and because so much energy is released everything in the path of it would be destroyed.

Since no event has triggered this so far (as far as we know) we assume that the energy needed to overcome that barrier are very huge and the only way that it could happen right now would be random tunneling.

However I am not a physicsfag so this could be wrong. It's how I have understood this.