How a false vacuum could lead to the destruction of the universe

When physicists at CERN discovered the Higgs boson in 2012 with the help of the Large Hadron Collider, they not only confirmed the last important building block of the Standard Model of elementary particle physics, which explains how particles acquire their mass (through the Higgs field, through which they move as through a viscous mass). In the process, they also measured the weight of the Higgs particle, which is 125GeV (giga-electron volts). And this is not just a number: It means that our un...