Physicists Think Alternate Universe 'Vacuum Bubble' May Destroy Existence

Physicists Think Alternate Universe 'Vacuum Bubble' May Destroy Existence

The universe is fundamentally unstable and might spontaneously collapse into a bubble of alternate reality, researchers have admitted.

This unfortunate news is thanks to Dr Joseph Lykken at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

According to the BBC, Dr Lykken thinks that a concept known as 'vacuum instability' could cause the eventual demise of our universe.

The theory states that in billions of years a "bubble" made of an alternative universe will pop into existence after a quantum fluctuation, at a lower energy state than the rest of the universe.

That bubble will then start to expand at the speed of light and eventually "sweep everything before it", enveloping the universe itself.

"If you use all the physics that we know now and you do what you think is a straightforward calculation, it's bad news," Dr Lykken said at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

"It's all bad news."

The theory has arisen partly thanks to the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle - that which gives other particles mass - at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

The particle's existence is said to make a "cyclical" universe, where space is constantly collapsing and expanding into existence, more likely.

"A little bubble of what you might think of as an 'alternative' universe will appear somewhere and then it will expand out and destroy us," Lykken said.

Luckily (in a sense) the Earth and the Sun will be destroyed before the universe decides to pop out of existence.

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