All the famous scientists had put down bets on how big the explosion would be. Edward Teller, IIRC, had a macabre one: it would set off a chain reaction that would ignite the atmosphere through nitrogen and hydrogen fusion.

Calculations were done, and the possibility of it happening was shown to be one in a million. The test went ahead.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/rg/la602_vs_rhic_review/ (The link in Yudkowsky's essay seems to currently be down, but if you google the filename you find mirrors like www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/docs1/00329010.pdf )

"shown"!? "supposed" you mean right!? Or is there one in a million chance of this happening any time a nuclear bomb is/was tested?

Or, to put it in another way, the data they had clearly showed that it couldn't happen, but taking into account all known sources of errors, there was a one-in-a-million chance that the data they had was the result of random errors.

The possibility that we are living in a false vacuum has never been a cheering one to contemplate. Vacuum decay is the ultimate ecological catastrophe; in the new vacuum there are new constants of nature; after vacuum decay, not only is life as we know it impossible, so is chemistry as we know it. However, one could always draw stoic comfort from the possibility that perhaps in the course of time the new vacuum would sustain, if not life as we know it, at least some structures capable of knowing joy. This possibility has now been eliminated.

The second special case ... applies if we are now living in the debris of a false vacuum ... This case presents us with less interesting physics and with fewer occasions for rhetorical excess than the preceding one.

S. Coleman and F. De Luccia (1980). "Gravitational effects on and of vacuum decay". Physical Review D21: 3305.

"There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened." [1]

I can't believe I'm the first one to get this quote in :)

[1] http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Douglas_Adams/

It's not an especially cheerful idea, to be honest. Even if that argument works -- and to be fair, this is about the best possible scenario for it -- it's too easy to generalize.

There's no particular reason you should limit your self-identification to just the other branches you exist in in this universe. The full argument is a bit oversized for this site, but.. consider that there are branches where you've got the exact same past as here (as far as you can tell), except that you're actually living in a simulation being run by some alien.

If you accept the notion of quantum suicide, and also provisionally this expanded version, then consider that even if the proportion of timelines in which you live in simulations (and thus, the credence you should give to such claims) is low now, a sufficient number of vacuum collapse events could actually change that over time.

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

When does it shift you to another parallel universe? At the moment your consciousness would get lost? At the moment your body gets wounded but your mind still experiences it? At the moment a bullet starts flying towards you?

What about dying from getting old, if "it" has to keep your mind alive, does it mean everyone eventually ends up experiencing a world where they get 10000+ years old while the rest doesn't?

According to this interpretation there is no "shift", just copies. In fact, this interpretation is attractive exactly because it doesn't have the weird feature of the copenhagen interpretation where the wavefunction collapses when it is "observed", whatever that means.

So a more correct interpretation would be : there's infinitely many copies of you, each experiencing slightly different event, and while most survive (an infinite number), every moment in time there's a few (still an infinite number though) die horribly every moment in time.

Sooner or later it will be one of you reading this. :)

O_O ...

> ...the experiments unexpectedly create a bubble of something more stable than ordinary vacuum, dubbed novo-vacuum, that expands outward at half the speed of light as ordinary vacuum collapses to this new state at the border... The local population is forced to flee to ever more distant star systems to escape the steadily approaching border...

In addition the paper makes a nice sales pitch for a future electron-positron collider.

[1]http://pubdb.desy.de/fulltext/getfulltext.php?uid=23383-5971... (pdf)

[2] News for me, I am no specialist.

You know the Higgs Boson as the "god particle". Well, there's also the "oh my god particle", which was a cosmic ray with observed energy on the order of 300,000,000 TeV.

So, still not an issue, but not quite as far from omg collision energy's. And still no where near what can happen in and near black holes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh_my_god_particle

Because I've heard it both ways before, and even in the article it mentions something about two bubbles that are separate from each other colliding.

In the later circumstances...

What I can't understand is how two universes that are "separated" from each other by a vacuum (no space-time fabric) could ever collide... As they are separate by a pure nothingness, they for all purposes exist inside different realms and have no chance of ever colliding as there is nothing for them to travel through to reach each other.

But the important difference between "stable" and "metastable" is that metastable systems spontaneously collapse, whereas stable systems don't. According to the theory, we could be at a metastable vacuum energy state, which means that we could spontaneously drop to a lower energy state at any time. The difference between "metastable" and "unstable" is really just the time span involved.

If I'm understanding you correctly, you're arguing that since we've had 15 billion years so far with no collapse, then odds are great that we've got billions more to go. My point is that if the bubble collapse is not instantaneous, then we don't actually know there's been no collapse so far.

Carpe Diem.

That's exactly it, there is much more physics to discover and count in. People always think they know everything, at every point in history.

If we thought we knew everything, we'd stop researching. They're called "theories" for a reason.