A ball sits in a pit. It won't roll out on its own: it needs a push. But in the quantum world, a particle can leak through a barrier without extra energy. This trick is called tunneling. A similar stunt could be pulled by the vacuum of the universe: if it isn't the most stable (physicists call it "false vacuum"), it might one day spontaneously transition to another state. The consequences would be catastrophic.

Gravity strongly influences such a transition. It can be described in different ways. Through curved spacetime, as in Einstein's theory. Through its "torsion"—that's teleparallel gravity, or TEGR. Or through "non-symmetric" geometry — symmetric teleparallel gravity, STEGR. In classical physics, all three versions give identical predictions. Like three translations of the same book. But does this equality hold in the quantum realm, where randomness reigns? The authors tested the idea on false vacuum decay.

This agreement is not just a mathematical exercise. At the quantum level, it hints that different "languages" of gravity describe the same underlying reality. And if we ever understand why the vacuum is stable (or not), it could help refine the Standard Model of particle physics and perhaps look beyond it.