What exactly is vacuum decay?
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It helps to have [this](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9b/Falsevacuum.svg/1200px-Falsevacuum.svg.png) image.
Generally, people/things/the universe likes to be in places of minimum energy states; if something is in a higher state of energy, it tries to return to the lowest form.
The image shows you can have local minima (the well on the right), and absolute minima (the well on the left). If you imagine an energy state as being a marble rolling on that graph, then can you see how if the marble reaches the local minimum, it doesn’t necessarily know that it *can* go to the absolute minimum? That doesn’t mean that it *can’t* go to the absolute minimum – but until something happens to make that local minimum disappear, it’ll just sit happily on the right without a care in the world.
The idea of false vacuum decay is that our universe exists in a local minimum, and that if our local minimum decides to collapse to try and achieve the absolute minimum, it’ll take our entire reality with it.
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