Matthew C. Johnson

A false vacuum is not just a supercooled liquid, but a quantum hologram, ready to spring to life under the right projection. Its decay is described by the tunneling of a quantum field from a metastable minimum, and the classic calculation via Euclidean instantons is as elegant as a still life under spotlights.

A cold, black mirror — that's what the sea of dark energy, the invisible substance driving the expansion of the universe, looked like for billions of years. But the DESI spectrograph has caught a faint ripple.