False Vacuum Decay and how it applies to us or anything?
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Everything that happens in the universe happens against a zero/baseline energy. False vacuum theory is that there’s a lower zero/baseline that we can’t get to.
Imagine you have a marble in a bowl. You can rock it back and forth, spin it around, flick it, etc. It’ll rattle around in the bowl and then come to a rest at the lowest point in the center.
In our current theory of the universe the sides of the bowl are infinitely tall. That no matter how hard you hit the marble it’ll stay in the bowl and eventually settle back down to the lowest part in the middle.
False vacuum theory is saying “what if the sides aren’t infinitely tall, what if the bowel has sides of a limited height and is sitting on a kitchen table?” In this case you could knock the marble out of the bowl and it’d fall to the kitchen floor. The “zero” energy assumption was wrong, it still had gravitational potential energy that it just couldn’t release. Give it enough of a kick and it could release that energy, which in False Vacuum theory is possibly a lot of energy, enough to suck the rest of the universe over the edge of the bowl and into oblivion.
As u/revaniteanime notes – to an extent it doesn’t matter. Either it doesn’t exist, or it does and it’ll travel at the speed of light and wipe everything in its path out before anything even knows something happening.
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