Dennis Overbye on Vacuum

“If all the properties of the universe, such as charge and momentum, balanced out, as Guth, who was a fan as well as a scholar of theories of nothing, pointed out to me, no laws of physics forbade the spontaneous appearance of the universe—or a quantum piece of one. ...Nothing, some physicist implied, might be the ultimate symmetry, everywhere, everywhen the same... Mostly we knew what nothing was not. It was not anything. But it was the possibility of everything. And perhaps such beauty, nothing, was unstable. And the result was every once in an eternity it twitched. ...The first soul brave enough to suggest the universe was indeed nothing was Ed Tryon... [who] blurted it out during a seminar with Sciama, "Suppose the universe is just a quantum fluctuation." Everybody laughed. ... Tryon eventually published these notions in Nature in 1975 and was mostly ignored. Peebles and Dicke had mentioned his work in their famous 1979 paper about enigmas and conundrums.”

“When the Higgs field froze and symmetry broke, Tye and Guth knew, energy had to be released... Under normal circumstance this energy went into beefing up the masses of particles like the weak force bosons that had been massless before. If the universe supercooled, however, all this energy would remain unreleased... according to Einstein, it was the density of matter and energy in the universe that determined the dynamics of space-time. ...The issue of vacuum energy had been a tricky problem for physics ever since Einstein. According to quantum theory, even the ordinary "true" vacuum should be boiling with energy—infinite energy... due to the the so-called vacuum fluctuations that produced the transient dense dance of virtual particles. This energy... could exert a repulsive force on the cosmos just like the infamous cosmological constant... quantum theories had reinvented it in the form of vacuum fluctuations. The orderly measured pace of the expansion of the universe suggested strongly that the cosmological constant was zero, yet quantum theory suggested it was infinite. Not even Hawking claimed to understand the cosmological constant problem... a trapdoor deep at the heart of physics.”