False vacuum original paper I'm trying to track down the origin of the False Vacuum paradigm. Is it Coleman and de Luccia's "Gravitational Effects on and of Vacuum Decay"
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.21.3305
 A: There are earlier references - I have a copy of "The Fate of the False Vacuum" by Sid Coleman in a collection of reprints.  I don't know if this is the earliest reference though.
A: The earliest bubble-tunneling vacuum decay paper that I know of is
Bubbles in Metastable Vacuum
I.Yu. Kobzarev, L.B. Okun, M.B. Voloshin (Moscow, ITEP)
Oct 1974 - 16 pages
Sov.J.Nucl.Phys. 20 (1975) 644-646
Yad.Fiz. 20 (1974) 1229-1234
ITEP-81-1974.
I have also to blow my own trumpet a bit and claim that I independently came up with  vacuum-decay bubbles in
"Lifetime and decay of excited vacuum" states of a field theory associated with nonabsolute minima of its effective potential"
M. Stone
Physical Review D 14 (12), (1976) 3568
Because I used Sidney's bozonization trick I sent him a copy of this paper and I think that that was what got him thinking about the general case.
My more general bubble-tunneling paper
"Semiclassical methods for unstable states"
M. Stone
Physics Letters B 67 (2), (1977) 186-188
was submitted in  Nov 1976 two months before Sidney's  "Fate of the false vacuum" paper (Jan 1977). Sidneys paper was better titled, much better-written, and more comprehensive than mine though, and deserves its fame.
There are no gravitational effects I think before Coleman and De Luccia.
