The Vacuum of Space

 From Popular Mechanics:

In new preprint research, scientists in Slovenia have adjusted a calculation to determine how long we have before the vacuum of space decays. While this date is still an extraordinarily long time into the very, very far future, our math model to determine it is loose enough to invite more questions than answers.

It’s intuitive that we struggle to nail down the far future this way—it’s honestly more amazing that we can estimate the date at all. So, how do scientists do it?

Matt von Hippel explains about the “vacuum” in the standard model for Quanta. Our universe is filled by quantum fields, many of which are empty or zero. One, the Higgs field, is not:

 Called the Higgs field, it controls the mass of many fundamental particles, like electrons and quarks. Unlike every other quantum field physicists have discovered, the Higgs field has a default value above zero. Dialing the Higgs field value up or down would increase or decrease the mass of electrons and other particles. If the setting of the Higgs field were zero, those particles would be massless.

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