How a Quantum Bubble Lit Up the Universe ✦
The standard picture of the Big Bang (proposed by Georges Lemaître and confirmed by Edwin Hubble) paints the early Universe as hot and dense. The cause of that heat could be the unstable state of ordinary matter. According to a new theory, after ultra-fast expansion, the energy hid in dark matter and dark energy, while ordinary particles froze in an unstable state—like supercooled water, about to freeze.
A quantum nudge (quantum tunneling) triggered crystallization: icy bubbles of a new phase appeared. Their walls accelerated to dizzying speeds and, upon colliding, shook spacetime. This generated gravitational waves—ripples that still wander the cosmos. Detectors like LIGO can pick them up. Remarkably, due to the extreme speed, each wall was compressed a trillion times, becoming thinner than an atomic nucleus.
This scenario naturally explains why the Universe is full of disorder (entropy): collisions mixed all matter. Calculations show that this transition does not create primordial black holes (thanks to the criterion of Stephen Hawking), so there’s no contradiction with observations. And the cosmic microwave background bears the imprint of those events.
🎯 The bubble walls accelerated so fast that their thickness was compressed a trillion times, becoming thinner than an atomic nucleus.
🎬 In science fiction, vacuum decay is often frightening, as in Greg Egan’s novel ‘Schild’s Ladder.’ But this work shows it could have been the cradle of our world.