Schild's Ladder
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Schild's Ladder (ISBN 0-06-107344-X) is a 2002 science fiction novel by Greg Egan.
This novel is perhaps the hardest ever published by Egan, filled with non-trivial mathematics and physics. A two-millimetre high physicist, Cass, starts an experiment that inadvertently creates a bubble of something more stable than ordinary vacuum. This bubble of novo-vacuum expands at half the speed of light as ordinary vacuum collapses to this new state at the border, swallowing everything in its path. The human population is forced to flee to ever more distant solar systems to escape the steadily approaching doom, but since the expansion never slows, it is just a matter of time before the novo-vacuum swallows any given planet.
A group of people, travelling just ahead of the border in a starship, are probing the novo-vacuum in order to understand the physics that makes it possible. Two factions grow ever more apart as the bubble swallows star after star: the Preservationists, who wish to stop the expansion and preserve the galaxy at any cost; and the Yielders, who consider the novo-vacuum too important to destroy.
But the novo-vacuum is more complex than either side suspects. Egan's usual topics of simulation and virtual reality are taken to the extreme when we learn that life is thriving inside this zone of apparent destruction, existing not as physical particles but as direct constructions of the underlying "quantum graph" (a lattice describing the theory of everything) of which physical particles are only a special case.
