Scale-invariant instantons and the complete lifetime of the standard model

We might be able to generate hypotheses using it as a premise?

For context: This reply was written when the title on here was "With 95% confidence, we expect our Universe to last more than 10^58  years"

>> More generally, what's even the point of placing a confidence level on a non-falsifiable claim?

One can answer questions like: Is it worthwhile for people to attempt to colonize the galaxy? When things like getting to other stars will take lifetimes, and getting across a galaxy 100M light-years across may take more time than has already passed, one needs to have some idea if there is even enough time left for such undertakings. Of course the lifetime of the galaxy will probably be less than 10^50 years, at least it puts the universe as a whole into better context. And really, in spite of any crazy ideas just putting ourselves into context seems to be important to a lot of people.

> The reason why everyone trusts the LIGO result is that we have an extremely high degree of confidence in general relativity.

No, that's not true. The reason everyone "trusts" the LIGO results is because we believe the people running the experiment are trustworthy. The results have nothing to do with GR except insofar as they were designed to test a heretofore untested prediction of GR (which prediction they have confirmed).

And the reason we want to test a prediction of GR is that we want to try to falsify it, because that is the way progress is made in science.

I think you may have meant to say something about how we cannot know for certain that GR is true, that that's right, we can't. But it's not like Einstein just pulled GR out of a hat. It's the only known solution to the problem that fits all of the known data. That doesn't prove it's true, but it is the best explanation we have so we might as well carry on as if it's true until someone proves otherwise or comes up with a better idea.

>> ...subject to our assumed framework and chosen prior.

This is usually implicit in such analyses.

>> More generally, what's even the point of placing a confidence level on a non-falsifiable claim? What utility does it serve?

It's not about falsifiability in the sense that someone should go out and measure the predicted lifetime of the universe experimentally.

The point of such lifetime calculations (and their associated confidence levels) is more as a test of the underlying theory - the Standard Model of particle physics. If this theory would make the prediction that the lifetime of the universe should be shorter than the observed lifetime of the universe, then clearly there is something wrong with the theory, or with the way the lifetime has been computed, since clearly we are still here to make that calcuation. Usually, this is seen as a sign that there should be some new physics - i.e. physics that is not described by the standard model in its present form - that should enter at an energy scale relevant to the calculation. Since this we do not know about this physics yet, the calculation is necessarily incomplete, which would explain finding a "too short" lifetime of the universe, while with a more complete theory one would (hopefully) find a result, that explains observed lifetime of the universe.

The fact that the paper finds a "long enough" lifetime of the universe, could be seen as an indication that the theory is able to make predictions at energy scales relevant to this calculation.

'infinity' is more of a logical construction than a physical one.

I think your question actually raises a key point ... "one of these bubbles". How accurate is their prediction that these bubbles aren't common? And is there somewhere nearby that might be hiding one?

On their time-scale, Musk's goal of becoming an interplanetary species seems like a good near-term hedge. Being able to traverse our own galaxy would be a good second step but exponentially harder. People have discussed the almost impossible task of moving between galaxies (without something like a worm-hole).

So, assuming the multi-verse theory is correct, I guess we humans need to look into how to get to another universe before this big cataclysm. (It seems pretty easy on "Stranger Things")

Going with the paper's result: with 95% confidence, more than 10^58  light years. :)

I think the most solid argument in favor of the quantum multiverse is along the lines of "The universe is virtually certain to fall into a lower-energy quantum vacuum state. That we have not observed it to be the case means either that we have been astonishingly lucky, or that there is a selection process going on. There is such a selection process; we can only witness futures in which the entire past lightcone of the universe has not collapsed; despite the near-certainty that such has occurred there are still far more possible universes than that." In short, the quantum multiverse argument can be run backwards in time, too; a given quantum system will observe a superposition of all possible past states of the universe as it evolves forward in time, and we can only see the ones in which we still survive.

Now, I still don't believe in the quantum multiverse. We have not proved to my satisfaction that lower-energy quantum vacuum states are inevitable, on the grounds that we don't know enough yet to know why it hasn't happened. (i.e., there may be other effects keeping it from happening, or perhaps there are reasons why it actually can't happen such as the lower state being non-viable for some other reason, etc.) But in my opinion, this is still the most solid argument in its favor; if it can be established that our current universe with near-certainty should evolve into something that we can't live in or observe with a bubble expanding at the speed of light, it's going to take something equally potent to counteract that.

Or, in other words, under this theory, for every split second of your entire life, vastly, vastly more of your worldlines are getting lightspeed-annihilated than not. %99.999... "keep writing 9s as long as you like" of them. But the destruction is so total and instantaneous that you can never observe this fact, so you go on happily living in the 0.00...01% of the remainder, happy as a clam. Again, this isn't my own personal belief, but it's a theory.

So "get out before the bubble pops" applies all the way up to cosmic scales?

It’s worth pointing out that we don’t know if we live in an infinite or finite universe, so that’s an assumption made by the authors.

I don't understand what is the point of your comment, I am a physicist and I understand this paper but this does not mean that others should worry if they don't.

I was about to say, this headline sounds like one of those fake papers generated by a machine learning algorithm, like SCIgen (https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/).

The anthropic principle, had we been in an unstable region, we wouldn't be able to talk about it now.

A completely stable universe might also have some issues that are not immediately clear.

That's actually a very good question. Moreover, if inflation really happened in the early universe, its almost impossible that the Higgs would have remained in the metastable vacuum during that period. Thus only fine-tuning wouldn't be enough to explain our existence.

More on this: https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.04825

Some systems are self-tuning, perhaps that's what's happening.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organized_criticality

well if it ends tomorrow with half an hour warning I am definitely going to let them have a piece of my mind!

Well, since it’s the result of a long chain of logic based on the standard model and measurement of various constants, they could be proven wrong in a variety of ways—their logic could be faulty, their calculations incorrect, or the standard model itself could be flawed.