Vacuum Decay Is Not Coming Soon To A Place Near You

I have a short piece at Quanta Magazine this week, about a physics-y end of the world as we know it called vacuum decay. . . .

Gamma () here is the decay rate, its inverse gives the time it takes for a cubic gigaparsec of space to experience vacuum decay. The three uncertainties are from experiments, the uncertainties of our current knowledge of the Higgs mass, top quark mass, and the strength of the strong force. . . . Vacuum decay might happen in as few as years or as many as years, and that’s the result of an actual, reasonable calculation! 

From 4gravitons.

This is yet another circumstance in which precise measurements of these particular physical constants matter a lot. 

The relative uncertainty in the Higgs boson mass is about 0.08%. The relative uncertainty in the top quark mass is about 0.17%. The relative uncertainty in the strong force coupling constant is about 0.76%. The observable universe is about 10^10.15 years old.