Density-Dependent Vacuum Transitions: Vacuum-State Coalescence

Standard cosmology presents us with one of the most profound challenges in all of science: how do we begin to think about the Big Bang itself, or the pre-geometric state that preceded it? How do we reason about a condition in which space, time, and physical law had not yet taken the form we know, where the very substrate of reality was something fundamentally different from anything we can directly observe or measure?

One way to approach this is through analogy. Imagine bubbles packed tightly together, locked and contained within a structured, multi-cellular arrangement, the kind of foam you might see in a glass, or in nature. Each bubble is separated from its neighbours by thin internal walls called lamellae. Now imagine that one of those walls grows thin, thins further, and finally fails, not destroying the entire foam, but merging two adjacent cells into one, releasing energy, and allowing the surrounding structure to reconfigure. That process is called coalescence. This paper proposes that something structurally analogous to this may describe how our universe began.

This paper is an additional companion piece to "Pre-Spacetime Universe: Dark Energy, Cyclic Cosmology and the Structured Vacuum" (DOI:10.5281/zenodo.18921299), "The Ontological Priority of the Void" (DOI:10.5281/zenodo.18810113), and to my "Optimisation Under Constraints" series (beginning with DOI:10.5281/zenodo.18530742). 

This paper continues to explore whether vacuum state transitions would occur with equal probability everywhere in the universe, or whether the dramatic physical differences between dense galactic environments and near-empty cosmic voids produce fundamentally asymmetric behaviour. 

Drawing on established results in false vacuum physics, gravitational suppression of vacuum decay, density-dependent vacuum energy, and the physics of foam coalescence, it argues that the void is the preferred site of vacuum transition, as well as the Big Bang itself may have been a local coalescence event in a structured pre-geometric medium.

I warmly welcome all constructive criticism, independent scrutiny, research expansion, and collaboration.