Cetacean conversations and cataclysmic decimations

We had a particularly great week for new research findings, in my opinion. I mean, stories like a 2% improvement in a chemical catalyst are important, sure. There are people out there in lab coats who will click on them. But then, some weeks, you get things like this directly captured, hi-res image of the universe’s cosmological filaments. Or the discovery of two miraculously preserved, ancient texts by Greek mathematician Apollonius that were believed to be lost to history. Or a study finding how RNA passes through cells with genetic instructions that are carried across entire generations.

Additionally, researchers reported on exciting findings related to whale language and the cataclysmic possibility that the universe exists in a false vacuum state:

What we talk about when we talk about whales talking

The charmingly quaint notion that humans are the only animals capable of spoken language was further upended this week by a report from an international research group that found a pattern in whalesong that is universally expressed in all human languages. This pattern is called Zipf’s law: It states that the most frequently used word in any language is twice as frequent as the second-most frequent, three times as frequent as the third-most frequent, and so on.

The researchers, whose backgrounds include linguistics and developmental psychology, analyzed song recordings of humpback whales in New Caledonia using techniques derived from studies of the language acquisition of human infants. Zipf’s pattern is learned culturally by each individual from others.

Like humans, whales have distinct cultures. Speech is continuous, without audible gaps between words, so infants listen for sounds within words themselves that are relatively predictable. While applying this technique to eight years of recorded whalesong, the researchers were surprised to see Zipf’s pattern emerge in the data.

While this is an exciting development, they emphasize that we are still unable to communicate with cetacean mammals because, as yet, scientists have no idea what whale phonemes signify. The team next plans to apply this technique to birdsong.

Theory still depressing

In 1980, physicists Sidney Coleman and Frank De Luccia explored the theory of the false vacuum—the idea that the universe is not a true vacuum, occupying the lowest-possible energy state, but instead, a false vacuum in a state of metastability. Metastability, which has applications in the study of landslides and crystallography, is an intermediate energy state higher than the actual state of least energy for a system.

Coleman and De Luccia, speculating about the possibility of a metastable universe collapsing to an unexpectedly lower vacuum state, wrote one of the most hilariously depressing conclusions ever published in a theoretical physics paper: “This is disheartening. The possibility that we are living in a false vacuum has never been a cheering one to contemplate. Vacuum decay is the ultimate ecological catastrophe; in a new vacuum there are new constants of nature; after vacuum decay, not only is life as we know it impossible, so is chemistry as we know it.

“However, one could always draw stoic comfort from the possibility that perhaps in the course of time the new vacuum would sustain, if not life as we know it, at least some creatures capable of knowing joy. This possibility has now been eliminated.”

I’m bringing this up because this week, an international team of physicists simulated false vacuum decay with a 5,565-qubit quantum annealer, which they used to mimic the behavior of bubbles in a false vacuum. The interactions of these bubbles are theorized to lead to vacuum decay.

While they don’t contribute to the somber, obituary-like tone of the 1980 study, they do provide better understanding of the dynamics between and among bubbles, and liken the theoretical “false vacuum” universe to a rollercoaster, with the potential of many drops to lower energy states before settling to a final, lifeless, true-vacuum state. Have a great weekend!

© 2025 Science X Network