Adam Brown

But these minima may just be local minima.

In fact, according to our understanding, the minima in which we live today

Good.

Well, I'm happy to be your clot.

The loss function is the energy density.

And so maybe a good analogy would be water.

Water can exist in many phases.

It can be steam, it can be water, it can be ice.

And even if it's in a cloud, let's say, it would rather be water than be water vapor, but it's having a tough time getting there because in the middle there's a barrier.

And so you know that just spontaneously it can eventually, due to a sort of thermal process, turn from steam into water.

These will be like the two minima in this lost landscape.

Or you can go and do cloud seeding to turn it from...

water, from water vapor into water.

And so those would be the equivalent of the minima here.

The existence of different minima in general is a very well-established part of physics.

The possibility that we could engineer going from one minima to another in a controlled way is a more speculative branch of physics speculation, but it seems totally consistent with everything we know that our distance attendants would try to attempt it.

What would it take to do this?

Probably you'd want something that would look a bit like a particle accelerator, but it would be considerably more controlled.

You'd need a very controlled way to sort of collapse a field and make a bubble of this new vacuum that was big enough that it would continue to expand.

rather than just re-collapse under its own surface tension.