False Vacuum Decay and how it applies to us or anything?
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Imagine a ball sitting on a table. The ball is *meta-stable*. That is, the ball is not in motion, but if you give it a little bit of energy to nudge it, it will roll off the table and fall, releasing its energy. The amount of energy it has to release is defined by the difference between the surface of the table and the ground.
Now, imagine an *infinite* table. You can give the ball some energy and raise it up, and push it around, but you can’t release any *more* energy than it being on the table, because it can’t fall off. There’s energy *there*, there’s a difference between the table and the ground, but because the ball can never reach the ground, that energy can’t do anything. The ball is not meta-stable, it’s just regular stable.
There is some energy in the background of the universe, in the supposedly empty vacuum of space – quite a bit, actually. Even when there is “nothing”, there is energy that manifests as virtual particles popping into and out of existence. But, like the ball on the infinite table, we’re pretty sure that the vacuum is *stable*. That energy can’t do anything.
But…what if it *isn’t*? What if the universe is only *metastable*? If so, a sufficiently energetic event might cause a portion of space to “fall off the table” and release all that energy. It could also just…happen because of quantum reasons. If that happens, the energy released would cause the space next to it to also “fall of the table” and release *its* energy, in a chain reaction that would destroy the universe as it exists and recreate it into something very, *very* different.
This *could* explain the birth of *our* universe – that there existed some form of reality which underwent such a vacuum decay, which birthed our rules of existence and our universe.
If such a thing happens, there is no way to see it or know about it ahead of time. The “explosion” propagates at the speed of light. In the very instant the light from the vacuum decay arrives, so will the decay itself. From a philosophical standpoint, there’s no point in worrying about it because there’s nothing you can do to stop it and you’ll never notice it.
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