Heritage Panel Shorts - Cream

Story

The "No Vacancy" capsule scrutinizes the impact of an absence of space. Commonly used to describe hotels with no more available rooms, this phrase can be taken as a stiff-armed affront, an excuse to exclude a particular group or groups of people, or merely a polite way to preemptively communicate a laudable economic position of a sold-out property. 

In physics--this concept of nothing, a vacuum, a void--is only metastable. Each point in space makes up an array of pendulums, known as a quantum field, and these pendulums hang downward at a 0° angle, jittering while in the system's preferred state, where it will stay for most of eternity--usually. A scalar field (basically a quantum field with pendulums that hover at a non-0° angle) can also still be stable when all pendulums prefer the same angle. However, if a certain amount of pendulums jitter into a non-0° angle in one location, they could force neighboring pendulums to meet them, which would cause a vacuum to fly outward almost at the speed of light. In other words, there is a way for nothingness to destroy atoms in the decay of a scalar field, leading to the demise of life.

With "No Vacancy", a clear line has been drawn, and you're either in or you're out. This may bring up feelings of triumph and connectedness, anguish and devastation. If researchers surmise that a vacuum could jitter itself into a true nothing, giving up its own existence, why wouldn't you use today's currently stable state to go after what you desire?