Re: Mass/Energy Conversion

On Jul 14, 6:24 pm, Logan Kearsley <chronosur...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I shall have to research this some more.
Would it be possible to make them artificially?

Maybe. With bigger and better accelerators.

Unlimited energy to play with? Sure, focus the energy into a small
volume so that the temperature exceeds the electroweak symmetry
breaking temperature. The vacuum then undergoes a phase change inside
that volume, and the boundary between the heated volume and the rest
of the universe is a domain wall. As soon as the heated volume cools,
however, it will "crystallize" into a new broken electroweak symmetry,
and since it is immediately adjacent to our universe's vacuum state's
breaking of that symmetry, it will use that as its seed value and
become like the usual vacuum again. The domain wall vanishes in the
process.

And if you throw junk at it from outside before it vanishes?

The particles that make up the junk will not be stable after they
cross the domain wall. They will turn into forms that are stable.
Then, as they go back into our universe, the particles change again so
that they are stable in the vacuum state we exist in. In the process,
matter can be turned into radiation and a mix of matter and
antimatter.

Is there perhaps a way to nudge it from outside to maintain the
unstable equilibrium where the total energy is zero and it stays at
one size? Preferably with a failure mode where it collapses, rather
than expands....

Preferably. I'm envisioning the kind of mindset that led to
Chernobyl...

Cosmic strings may be more useful - if you can generate
domain walls, you may also be able to generate cosmic strings and
monopoles (other topological defects). Cosmic strings will be less
massive, but loops of cosmic strings will also tend to decay.

Do we know how to do that? I presume it's more complicated than just
putting a lot of energy in a small space.

To some extent it is not really different. As the vacuum
"recrystallizes", it can pick up topological defects that take the
form of cosmic strings and/or monopoles. since we don't see monopoles
floating around today, you probably need to go well beyond electroweak
unification temperatures and into temperatures that lead to
inflation. Going to inflationary vacuum states leads to pocket
universes connected to us by a wormhole. If the topology of spacetime
can not be changed, this wormhole will be unable to decay completely,
although it will rapidly collapse down to minuscule radii. If the
topology of spacetime cannot change, the wormhole will pinch shut
before you can put anything through it into the baby universe. Still,
after the wormhole does its thing, you might have a few remnant
topological defects lying around.

Just because no one has yet been sufficiently clever to figure out how
to make some of these beasties doesn't mean no one ever will.

One can say the same thing about p-p fusion, though. What makes one
more plausible than the other?

Because we know how p-p fusion works. We know a great deal about the
minute details of its reactions and cross sections and how to catalyze
it in the hearts of super-hot stars and how long it takes and when it
just doesn't work. The latter bit makes p-p fusion very implausible
for engineering purposes on anything less than a stellar scale. On
the other hand, we have lots of theoretical justification for nucleon
decay under certain exotic conditions, but we really don't know the
details. We haven't developed the full theory nor explored the
implications of those various competing theories we have, and
certainly we have no experimental evidence to guide us as we do for p-
p fusion. So maybe nucleon decay is as difficult to get working as p-
p fusion. Maybe it is harder. Maybe it is a lot easier once the LHC
at CERN discovers the first stable monopole and begins producing them
in bulk. If you write a SciFi story that uses p-p fusion, I will roll
my eyes but perhaps sustain my disbelief if the story is good enough.
If you explain it as catalyzed baryon decay using stable exotic
particles, it at least could happen, given our current lack of
knowledge of the relevant physics.

Luke
.

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