Season 17, Episode 3: Bubble Universes Explained

Hey StarTalkers! Season 17, Episode 3 saw Neil and Chuck tackle a selection of “Cosmic Queries,” including lots of black hole questions and one intriguing inquiry about “bubble universes.”

Alcubierre Drives, Antimatter Multiverses & More! | Cosmic Queries #103This “bubble universe” discussion covered some interesting ground – such as the possible relationship with dark energy and dark matter – but it was quite short for a topic so complex.

So if you’re feeling lost about what a bubble universe even is, this is the crash course you’ve been looking for. While there are many interesting papers touching on the original question, here the focus is on Alan Guth’s influential 2007 paper.

The “False” Vacuum and the Creation of the Universe

The crucial idea underpinning “bubble” universes is the idea of a false vacuum. Check the first attached figure (taken from the paper) for a useful visual.

The core idea is that the “inflaton field” – a field hypothesized to drive cosmic inflation – was originally resting at a “false vacuum.”

The figure shows it perfectly: imagine you lived your life on a raised plateau – like the ball in the diagram – and never knew anything beyond this surface. You’d think this was as low as things got, but in fact, what you see as the “lowest point” is much higher than the true lowest point.

You don’t know it, but you can still fall.

But for the inflaton field, “falling” means generating a new universe. Just like you’d lose gravitational potential falling from the plateau, the inflaton field loses potential energy, creating a bubble-burst of inflation, a.k.a. a universe.

The Cosmic Foam Multiverse

But it doesn’t stop there. Take a look at the next figure.

The false vacuum at the top splits into three: the new universe and two false vacuums. Crucially, this figure doesn’t show expansion: each new false vacuum is actually the same size as the original one.

As the graph continues downwards, you see what happens. Just like the original false vacuum state collapsed, so do the next two, and the next two, and so on.

A single bubble becomes a frothing mess of bubble universes: the bubble multiverse.

So the universe we know could be just a single bubble in a vast cosmic foam.