Phase Transition

The universe is all space, time and matter. It seems like we live in a perfect universe; with just enough gravity and just enough dark energy that will expand forever without ripping the universe apart.

But, the universe has to come to an end eventually. Scientists predict that the universe will eventually end in a deep freeze. Stars will eventually perish and transform into black holes or black dwarfs. All protons, the fundamental components of all stuff, including us, will eventually decay over the course of an impossibly vast period of time.The only thing remaining in the universe will be the monster black holes.

Scientists always assumed that black holes were immortal and kept feeding on forever, but the studies of Stephen Hawking tell us that this is not the case. The black holes will also eventually die due to a phenomenon called Hawking Radiation. They will get smaller and smaller and smaller until they reach the size of a millionth of a billionth of an inch. At that very moment, the black holes will die with a sudden burst of light, the last burst of light in the history of the universe.

But Quantum Physics could offer an alternate ending. And that end could take place in the very next second. An event so powerful, so destructive that it could destroy and change everything in a blink of an eye. A monster, phase transition, lurks in the shadows. And it could annihilate the fabric of space and time at any moment.

When water changes into ice, its properties change. If you lived in ice your world would be very different. When water goes through this transition it changes its phase.

If you leave a plastic bottle filled with water in your freezing car overnight, or in a deep air-conditioned room, the top layer of it turns into ice. But as soon as that frost moves and touches another molecule of water, it transforms all the water, molecule by molecule, into that same frost. That change into something new is called a phase transition. And bizarrely the exact same thing could happen to empty space.

We should not take for granted that the vacuum, which we call nothing, is actually very stable. It could be that energy stored in empty space is just waiting to be released in a phase transition. If it is then the laws of physics will change. A spontaneous glitch in the fabric of spacetime could trigger a phase transition of space. A tiny bubble of a new universe that spreads out over minding the old. We know it can happen because it has happened before.

At the moment of the Big Ban. The first created universe is completely different from the one we reside in today. It is hot, without form- no time, no matter, and the laws of physics are completely different. A trillionth of a second later, a glitch in that universe triggers a phase transition. A minuscule bubble of the universe we have a home in today forms and spreads outwards, destroying everything that it touches, like ice spreading through water. The energy that is released creates space, time, the building blocks of matter, and the forces that govern them. The old universe gives up its energy to create a new. But the vacuum of space still has energy bound to it today, perhaps this is the dark energy the physicists observe.

This leads us to believe that another glitch in spacetime may trigger a new phase that destroys us and the entire universe. This is a way to destroy an entire universe. Because inside it are the seeds of its own destruction. It will spread out as a death bubble at the speed of light ruining everything it touches, galaxies, stars, planets, and even the black holes. Nothing can survive the expanding phase transition.

Inside this bubble protons are unstable, atoms begin to rearrange into a new form of matter. As this bubble expands a new universe is being formed in the corpse of the new universe and the beginning of a new law of physics.

So the expanding universe that we now see may end in a phase transition but we won't know it's hitting us because the laws of physics will change and we will essentially, most likely disappear at the instant it happens. This bubble will expand at the speed of light, and as it passes you all the atoms in your body will rearrange themselves and you would never know it. You would have no warning because the bubble itself is expanding at the speed of light. We can never know precisely what could happen or when it would happen, so what you are really predicting is the rate, does it happen once a month, once a year or once every ten billion years, or once in every google year. It's very possible that these bubbles will grow once every 20 billion years.

It has not happened yet, because we got lucky. It is unlikely that will happen in the next month or the next day. But it certainly can happen for the laws of physics absolutely allow it.

A phase change may happen or it may not, but the universe plays its cards close to its chest, and like dark energy and dark matter the universe will certainly come up with more surprises. Whatever the universe is up to we still don't know enough, but we are in an age of discovery right now, perhaps there is something else out there that we don't know about. The future is still uncertain and there is still a mystery. And that seems like the most exciting possibility of all.

Bibliography:

Sutter, Paul M. “The End Of The Universe” Discovery +. 16th July, 2014. Video. 3rd June, 2022.