Bubble, Bubble, Boil and Trouble
I’m very confused about the fate of metastable de Sitter universes like the one discussed previously.
They decay by nucleating bubbles of true vacuum (with an incredibly long lifetime). But, surely, such bubbles don’t coalesce, as they are surrounded by regions of de Sitter space, which expand exponentially.
You might have thought that since the true vacuum is (10 dimensional) flat space, we don’t have to beat our heads against the wall trying to understand quantum gravity in (eternal) de Sitter. But if the bubbles don’t coalesce, it doesn’t seem that we’re out of the woods yet!
Posted by distler at February 9, 2003 9:37 AM