What is a false and a true vacuum?

[Manuel I Komnenos]

I've heard that the vacuum metastability event is a theoretical doomsday event. Could someone explain more in an easy way because English is not my 1st language and this thing seems complicated.

[Gordon Freynman]

A true vacuum is a vacuum at it's lowest energy state possible, while a false vacuum is one that is not. False vacuums are in a metastable state, which means they are fairly stable but a big enough push could knock them down to a true vacuum state, which is what a metastability event is. Theoretically for this to happen you would need to concentrate tremendous amounts of energy in a single point. In this scenario a tiny bubble of a true vacuum would be created, which would then proceed to expand and nearly the speed of light, releasing the energy of the false vacuum in its path while simultaneously scrambling the forces of nature into something unrecognizable. If this were to happen it would truely be the end of literally everything as we know it, not that anything would be around to care though.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

[rant]On a side note, some of the irrational fear over things like the Large Hadron Collider and Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider boil down to speculative events like the above, however the fact is that many cosmic events, such as the merger of two super-massive black holes, occur throughout the universe that make particle collisions inside these machines look like a joke. Furthermore it is not even known if the vacuum we live in is true or false. It is safe to conclude that the doomsday fears over the LHC and RHIC are mostly the result of some over zealous and ignorant reporter who skimmed over some paper and spat out some sensationalized garbage onto his/her respective column.[/rant]

I have a lot of disdain for the popular media if you couldn't tell.

[Manuel I Komnenos]

A true vacuum is a vacuum at it's lowest energy state possible, while a false vacuum is one that is not. False vacuums are in a metastable state, which means they are fairly stable but a big enough push could knock them down to a true vacuum state, which is what a metastability event is. Theoretically for this to happen you would need to concentrate tremendous amounts of energy in a single point. In this scenario a tiny bubble of a true vacuum would be created, which would then proceed to expand and nearly the speed of light, releasing the energy of the false vacuum in its path while simultaneously scrambling the forces of nature into something unrecognizable. If this were to happen it would truely be the end of literally everything as we know it, not that anything would be around to care though.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

[rant]On a side note, some of the irrational fear over things like the Large Hadron Collider and Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider boil down to speculative events like the above, however the fact is that many cosmic events, such as the merger of two super-massive black holes, occur throughout the universe that make particle collisions inside these machines look like a joke. Furthermore it is not even known if the vacuum we live in is true or false. It is safe to conclude that the doomsday fears over the LHC and RHIC are mostly the result of some over zealous and ignorant reporter who skimmed over some paper and spat out some sensationalized garbage onto his/her respective column.[/rant]

I have a lot of disdain for the popular media if you couldn't tell.

Thanks. And if this was to happen is it true that the laws of physics would change? Even the numbers of constants as we know them? What would this mean for earth and the solar system? Would it just be erased before anyone had the time to notice it or would we experience slow catastrophic events?

[Plant]

I am guessing that we will cease to exist as we know it as soon as the near light speed bubble reasches us. Our very existence as we know it is due to several constants, which if changed, will change the physical matter of our bodies, never mind our minds.

[Manuel I Komnenos]

I am guessing that we will cease to exist as we know it as soon as the near light speed bubble reasches us. Our very existence as we know it is due to several constants, which if changed, will change the physical matter of our bodies, never mind our minds.

Would we or microorganisms, like microbes be able to adapt to this new environment over time if the changes were not too drastic?

It's been even proposed that we are currently living in a false vacuum and not in a true one. So I suspect that life can exist in both vacuums. Only it will have different properties.

[Plant]

In this new environment, it would be likely that there will be no life as we know it. The very constants which governs the formation of molecules will be changed.