Emptiness can be different. The lowest energy state is true vacuum, and any higher one is false. False vacuum resembles supercooled water: liquid at subzero, it instantly freezes from a single ice crystal. Here it's the same: the birth of a true vacuum bubble of critical size triggers irreversible growth. Alan Guth and Stephen Hawking suggested that this is how the universe began.

Recently, scientists using a computer model found out: everything depends on the bubble's initial size. The critical scale is vanishingly small, but it is the boundary between calm and catastrophe.

It is possible that the Universe is teetering in a false vacuum due to an unstable Higgs field — decay could begin at any moment.

Such fragility helps make quantum computers more reliable and protects quantum memory. Moreover, such transitions drove the inflationary expansion of the early Universe and shed light on quantum thermal effects.