It’s Wednesday morning now, and I feel slightly better than I did yesterday, which should probably be no surprise.  I went back to the house last night, and I had a decent sleep‒for me, anyway‒and no major evening issues.  Now I am working my way toward the office.  It’s payroll day, so it should be at least mildly more hectic than most other days, but it shouldn’t be too unbearable.

Well, it shouldn’t be unbearable at all.  I mean, the state of being unbearable or not is a purely binary thing, isn’t it?  Either something is bearable or it is not.  If something is unbearable, then it cannot be borne.  So, saying something is not “too unbearable” is probably almost always nonsensical.  I suppose one could imagine something being only just unbearable, so that one could almost be able to bear it…but not quite, and one would finally be forced to succumb to whatever outcome that entailed, despite one’s possibly heroic struggles.

In some ways that sounds like it could be worse than something being thoroughly and unequivocally unbearable.  If one can see that something is truly unbearable, one will probably be less likely even to try to bear it.  One would not bother attempting to style out the brunt of a supernova; if one could not get far enough away, one would presumably just close one’s eyes and grit one’s teeth and take what comfort one could in knowing that the explosion will probably happen and obliterate one faster than any nerve impulse could propagate.

That’s one of the (tiny) comforts about the possibility of there being a “vacuum collapse” of the universe, in which the present “dark energy” vacuum state could, hypothetically, quantum tunnel down to a lower, truer vacuum state than the present one*, releasing that potential energy drop in such a way that wipes out all currently existing particles/fields.

This would erase everything in our visible universe (the “visible” part is deliberate and crucial; do you see why?**) in a sort of wave of collapse that starts at the site of the first state change, like the propagation of ice crystals forming in hitherto supercooled water.  But though it would be a shame, from our point of view, it would be one we would never experience, since the bubble of state change would expand at the speed of light.  It would thus be literally impossible to see it coming, because once you could see it, it would already be there, and you would be wiped away before you could possibly be aware that it was happening.

By the way, this possibility is “only” hypothetical; we aren’t even sure it could happen, not least because we’re not sure whether the vacuum state of the universe is as low as it can go or not, among other things.  But don’t worry:  if the vacuum collapse of the cosmos doesn’t kill you, something else will.

Even my truly immortal vampires in Mark Red might be wiped out by vacuum collapse.  I suspect they would, which might be a comfort to many of them, so to speak.  Of course, that would depend very much on how the “supernatural” forces in that book’s universe interact with the vacuum state and other quantum fields.  It’s not inconceivable that they might survive even that.  How’s that for horrifying?

These are odd thoughts for a Wednesday morning, aren’t they?  I mean, on a Thursday they wouldn’t be that odd, and even less so on a Friday.  On a Saturday they would be almost boringly predictable.  But on a Wednesday morning?  That’s just, well…odd, as I said.

I’m being silly.  My apologies.

I guess it’s more uplifting than is the prospect of universal Armageddon***.  Though, really, the Tao te Ching (in the version with which I am familiar) encourages us to embrace death with our whole hearts because that will help us to be prepared for most everything else we can encounter.

It does not encourage us to love death or to seek it; quite the contrary.  We are merely encouraged to accept it, not just intellectually but viscerally, to internalize***** it.  This is one of those curious circumstances in which the Tao to Ching and the movie Fight Club give the same advice, which is no indictment of that advice in either direction.

I try not to indulge in the vice of advice, but I will express my hope that every one of you who reads this post today or any of my other posts has a particularly good day, today and every day hereafter.

You’ve suffered enough already.

*This is analogous to what is thought to have happened when the “inflaton” field dropped down to a much lower energy level about 13.8 billion years ago, releasing the differential energy as the very hot soup of elementary particles that eventually became the universe we see.

**Okay, fine, I’ll explain.  It’s not just that the wave is expanding at the speed of light and so one would “see” it only as it hits.  But, given the current, accelerating expansion of the universe, the wave of change could never, even in principle, reach areas of the cosmos that are outside our cosmic horizon, because those places are receding from us faster than the speed of light/causality.  There is no causal influence from us that can ever reach them, or vice versa (assuming no wormholes or warp drives or similar).  Likewise, someplace beyond our horizon****** could be collapsing already, but we need never worry, because that collapse is not going to reach us (unless it changes the rate of overall cosmic expansion or even reverses it, which is not inconceivable.  We might then find ourselves in (or near) an anti-deSitter space, in which case, well…yeah).

***Not to be confused with the often misused**** term “apocalypse” which is basically just synonymous with “revelation”.  It’s become associated with the end of the world (and with lesser catastrophes) because one of the alternative titles of the book of Revelation is “The Apocalypse of Saint John the Divine” or whatever they called that nut bar.

****That rhymed, and it had a good rhythm too, both quite by accident.  I did that in yesterday’s or Monday’s post as well, but I didn’t call attention to it.  Can you find it now?

*****I would love to be able to use the term to grok it as in Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, but much as when Fuckerberg stole the term “metaverse” from me, likewise Elon Musk and the would-be tech boys who idolize him have arrogated the term “grok” and made it embarrassing to use.  Don’t even get me started on the disgusting theft of the word Palantir by Peter Thiel.  He deserves to be tortured interminably for the unmitigated gall he has shown in daring to use that term, but I would accept his immediate, painless disintegration and that of his company.

******Speaking of horizons, it is interesting to wonder what a vacuum state collapse would do to currently existing black holes.  I suspect they would basically be impervious to it, since the vacuum state is something that exists within spacetime, with the gravitational field as the backdrop of other quantum fields, but we don’t necessarily know enough about quantum gravity to feel very sure, as far as I know.  I suspect it might change the specifics of Hawking radiation at the level of the event horizon, and thus change the specific rate of black hole decay.  Also, I think in the first rush of particles generated by such a vacuum decay, most black holes would grow briefly with the influx of newly released energy all around them that had previously been bound up in the vacuum energy.  But that’s just my initial intuition.