Sydney Coleman figured out how to destroy the universe. We're still trying to figure out if he was right.
Let's talk about something deeply uncomfortable. The universe might not be stable. I don't mean in a philosophical sense. I mean the actual quantum fields that give particles their mass could collapse at any moment, erasing everything at the speed of light.
This isn't speculation. It's a consequence of measurements we made at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012. The ratio between the Higgs boson mass and the top quark mass puts us in what physicists call a metastable state. Translation: we're in a local minimum, not the true minimum.
Here's what that means and why it matters.
First principles. What is matter? Strip away the philosophy and you're left with quantum fields. Not particles. Fields.
An electron isn't a tiny ball. It's a ripple in the electron quantum field that fills all of space. A photon is a ripple in the electromagnetic field. Quarks, gluons, all of it—ripples in their respective fields.
Quantum fields aren't empty space. They're everywhere, always.
This view emerged from Shelter Island in 1947. Feynman, Schwinger, and others figured out how quantum fields interact. Their work gave us quantum electrodynamics and eventually the Standard Model.
But there was a problem. A big one.
According to the math, all fundamental particles should be massless. Electrons, quarks, everything. Obviously wrong.
The solution came from Peter Higgs and others in 1964. Add another field. A scalar field with a single number at every point in space. But this field behaves differently than all the others.
Here's the key insight: when most quantum fields have no particles, they're zero everywhere. Empty. But the Higgs field never went to zero. As the universe cooled after the Big Bang, the Higgs field got stuck at a non-zero value everywhere.
Symmetry breaking: like a pencil falling from its balanced position
Think of it like a pencil balanced on its tip. Perfectly symmetric—looks the same from all angles. But unstable. Eventually it falls. When it does, it picks a direction. The symmetry breaks.
Same with the Higgs field. In the early universe, it was balanced at zero. Then it fell to a non-zero value. That broke the electroweak symmetry. The photon stayed massless. The W and Z bosons gained mass. Electrons, quarks—they all got mass from interacting with this now-everywhere Higgs field.
Problem solved. Mass explained. Nobel Prize awarded in 2013.
In the late 1970s, Coleman looked at the Higgs field and asked: why that particular energy value? Why did it settle there?
The answer: maybe it didn't.
Maybe the Higgs field fell into a local minimum, not the true minimum. Like a ball rolling down a hill and getting stuck in a small valley, when there's a much deeper valley further down.
The vacuum energy landscape. We might be stuck in the wrong valley.
In classical physics, the ball stays stuck forever. But quantum mechanics has this thing called tunneling. The ball can quantum-mechanically tunnel through the barrier to the lower state.
And here's where it gets bad.
If the Higgs field tunnels to the true minimum at any point in space, it creates a bubble. Inside the bubble, the Higgs field has a different value. Different masses for particles. Different fundamental forces. Probably no stable atoms.
The bubble expands at the speed of light. No warning. You wouldn't see it coming until it hits you. And when it does, the laws of physics change. Everything disintegrates.
Once vacuum decay starts, it spreads at light speed. You'd never see it coming.
"By macrophysical standards, once the bubble materializes, it begins to expand almost instantly with almost the velocity of light. As a consequence of this rapid expansion, if a bubble were expanding towards us at this moment, we would have essentially no warning of its approach until its arrival." — Sydney Coleman
Maybe. Probably not soon.
In 2012, the Large Hadron Collider found the Higgs boson. Mass: 125 GeV. The top quark: 173 GeV. That ratio—38%—puts us right in the metastable zone.
If the ratio was below 36%, we'd be stable. Safe. If above 42%, the Higgs field would've decayed immediately after the Big Bang. We wouldn't exist.
But at 38%, we're stuck in the middle. The field is metastable. It could decay. The probability is extremely low. Current estimates suggest it won't happen for 10^100 years or more. The universe is only 13.8 billion years old. We have time.
But here's the thing about probability. Even rare events can happen. Right now, somewhere in the universe, the Higgs field could be tunneling. A bubble could be expanding toward us at light speed. We wouldn't know until it arrived.
There's uncertainty in the calculations. We don't know the top quark mass precisely enough. We don't fully understand quantum gravity, which could stabilize things. New physics beyond the Standard Model might save us.
But the possibility is real. We discovered in 2012 that the universe's stability is a question mark. That the thing giving us mass—the thing making matter possible—might be temporary.
Sydney Coleman figured this out in the 1970s. He showed mathematically how the universe could end. Not through heat death or a Big Crunch, but through the Higgs field finding a lower energy state and erasing everything in its path.
He died in 2007, five years before we found the Higgs boson and confirmed the universe is metastable. I wonder what he would've thought about that.
Probably something along the lines of: "Now we're all sons of bitches."
Bottom line: The Higgs field could collapse at any moment. The probability is low enough that you shouldn't worry. But high enough that physicists do.