My first GFX project at PBS Spacetime: Vacuum Decay and the End of the Universe

Recently, I was offered the opportunity to work with the team at PBS Spacetime, a Youtube Channel that explores all things crazy in astrophysics, and pretty much everything beyond our planet.

Collaborating with the Spacetime team, I was responsible for Graphics Visualizations, in an awesome experience where we try to find means to illustrate and visualize exotic and intellectually challenging concepts for our viewers. My first collaboration considered destruction in a universal scale in Vacuum Decay and the end of the universe.

Over the last decade, scientists have come up with several possibilities on how the universe will end. The universe could essentially become a deep freeze, cooling down to the point where nothing can survive, or it could collapse in on itself, in a Big Crunch. Neither of these ends are as captivating as the universe meeting its destructive fate through vacuum decay.

Vacuum decay is easy to understand. In fact, it is related to something we are very familiar with in our own kitchen when we are boiling water for tea or some instant noodles. The bubble nucleation process that governs the transformation of water from the liquid to the gas phase, during boiling, is analogous to what happens in vacuum decay.

Here, a bubble pops into existence at some location in the universe. The laws of physics inside the bubble are vastly different to what is outside of it. The bubble begins to grow and expand at the speed of light, and in its growth consumes everything in the universe. As a result, the fundamental fabric of the universe is forever changed, physical laws and principles that we are familiar with are completely upended, and the precise balance of scales that has allowed the formation of stars, planets, galaxies, and even chemical elements is no more.

What remains after the event is a universe that is certainly not hospitable for humans. Much like a vacuum cleaner, vacuum decay provides a very “clean” ending to the universe. But, how did that bubble pop into existence in the first place?

For that and more, check out the video below by our team at PBS Spacetime!