In IDW’s Star Trek: Lower Decks #3, by Ryan North and Jack Lawrence, the USS Cerritos encounters an anomaly that has the power to destroy the known universe itself. Long-running franchises tend to ramp up the dramatic stakes of their stories over time, and after several galaxy-threatening events in the Star Trek shows of the past decade, it would seem we’re now onto events of cosmological significance.
The Cerritos’ long-range sensors have detected stars winking out of existence. Upon closer inspection, the crew discovers a rapidly expanding area of “vacuum collapse,” a decay of the minimum quantum energy state — an enormous black void expanding at the speed of light. Sounds harmless? Well, as Captain Freeman puts it, “A metastable shift would necessarily rewrite fundamental forces and cosmological constants, causing the complete collapse not just of life, but of matter — hell, even gravity as we know it.”
Is such an extreme event scientifically possible? Surprisingly, yes!
IDW
The quantum Higgs field that gives particles mass could be in a “metastable” energy state, where it exists above its true minimum energy level, sort of like a a little valley partway up a mountain. Only a potential energy barrier prevents the field from collapsing into that lower energy state, which implies that a hugely energetic event could get part of the field over the barrier, and downward into the new minimum state. In doing so, the decay would spread outward at the speed of light from the event, eventually swallowing space in all directions.
Astrophysicist Katie Mack names vacuum collapse as among potential universe-ending catastrophes in her excellent 2020 book, The End of Everything: (Astrophysically Speaking). She likens the prospect of vacuum collapse (like that of symmetry breaking as the early universe cooled) to a phase change in water:
“Imagine the vapor is the Higgs field — an energy field, present at every point in space. And imagine that at some point that Higgs field drastically changes character, as completely as vapor condensing into liquid water. If you’ve been used to encountering nothing but humid air, moving through a pool of water is a completely different prospect. When the Higgs field suddenly shifted in character, it was as though the laws of physics had condensed into a totally different form.”
Our best measurements of the Higgs field indicate that our universe is, indeed, in a metastable state. Mack continues:
“What’s wrong with being in a false vacuum? Quite possibly, everything. A false vacuum is at best a temporary reprieve from ultimate destruction. In a false vacuum, the laws of physics, including the ability of particles to exist at all, are contingent on a precarious balancing act that could be upset at any moment.”
If the prospect of this worries you, it shouldn’t. There’d be no way to see it coming, since the bubble of quantum annihilation would hit us at the speed of light. Moreover, if extremely high-energy cosmic events could trigger it, one would have happened already. Supernovae have been exploding and black holes have been merging for billions of years, and we haven’t vacuum collapsed so far.
Similar speculative ideas about true ground energies show up in astronomy around the idea that matter in neutron stars, tightly pressed together under immense density, could enter a lower energy “strange matter” state. This would cause the quarks inside of neutrons to coalesce into continuous nuclear matter (rather than discrete nuclear particles, neutrons and protons) at critical density.
If this were the true lowest energy state, the whole star would become, effectively, a single nucleus! Elsewhere in fiction, Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle features “ice-nine,” which changes the freezing point of water, thus solidifying any body of the liquid instantly. Unlike either of these phenomena, however, the expanding vacuum collapse catastrophe is unconstrained by contiguous matter, with the potential to wipe out the entire known universe.
IDW
It would be remiss to not point out that this phenomenon possesses a notable Star Trek parallel, in the harrowing Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Remember Me,” wherein Dr. Beverly Crusher becomes trapped in a “shrinking warp bubble” centered on her. As the episode unfolds, the extent of the universe around her shrinks, manifesting in crew members from far-flung locations mysteriously disappearing, until only she remains. Eventually, the universe itself is barely larger than the Enterprise. The situation Crusher finds herself in, marooned in a decaying bit of curved space, is the slow, claustrophobic reverse of a vacuum collapse.
In part two of this story, Star Trek: Lower Decks #4, on sale tomorrow, we’ll find out whether there’s a Wesley Crusher on the other end of the problem to deus ex machina the Cerritos into a safer universe. More likely, we will see the intrepid crew solve a truly insolvable catastrophe.
AIPT Science is co-presented by AIPT and the New York City Skeptics.
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