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Re:Quantum researchers able to split one photon into three by seqizz on Sunday March 01, 2020 @04:32PM (#22459519)
I sometimes think one day in a lab we'll trigger a bug of the universe and whole thing will dismantle..
Re:Quantum researchers able to split one photon into three by nuccy on Sunday March 01, 2020 @04:51PM (#22459634)
Actually something like that may indeed happen, but spontaneously, see about vacuum decay here [1]. Roughly speaking, the vacuum we know is meta-stable and eventually it can reach its zero state, but such change in any point in space will trigger a neighboring point to do the same and so on, so there will be a bubble expanding with a speed of light. The biggest problem is that the laws of physics of such vacuum are different and what is stable now will be unstable then, so atoms/molecules/anything made of them can no more exist. The worst is if this theory is correct, then such a bubble may already started to expand somewhere in the Universe and we will not know about it until it actually reaches us.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum

Re:Quantum researchers able to split one photon into three by tempay on Sunday March 01, 2020 @05:48PM (#22459948)
> the vacuum we know is meta-stable

It's not fully known if this is the case or not. If the standard model is accurate (which is a big if) then it's probably metastable but there is some still room for debate. See page 52 of https://arxiv.org/pdf/1707.08124.pdf

Re:Quantum researchers able to split one photon into three by chadcmulligan on Sunday March 01, 2020 @06:22PM (#22460126)
Theres a Greg Egan book - Schilds ladder which has something like this, very quantumy.
Re:Quantum researchers able to split one photon into three by dokem on Monday March 02, 2020 @08:26PM (#22470985)
If a super nova doesn’t glitch out the universe I think we’re safe for a while.