Hawking Warns That The Higgs Boson Could (Theoretically) Destroy The Universe

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
The Higgs boson has been hailed as one of the greatest physics discovery of all time, but preeminent scientist Stephen Hawking has a different take on the so-called God particle – he believes that it could destroy the universe.
Hawking, who has previously issued similarly apocalyptic warnings against contacting aliens and advanced artificial intelligence, believes the Higgs could become suddenly unstable at extremely high energy levels and cause both time and space to collapse, explained Jonathan Leake of the UK’s Sunday Times.
According to CNET’s Chris Matyszczyk, those comments were made in the preface to a new book compiling lectures from famous astronomers and scientists, in which Hawking wrote, “The Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become metastable at energies above 100bn gigaelectronvolts (GeV),” which could cause the universe to “undergo catastrophic vacuum decay, with a bubble of the true vacuum expanding at the speed of light.”
Worse yet, the British astrophysicist said that such an incident could occur at any time, and nobody would even see it coming. However, Matyszczyk said, “before you prepare your loved ones for an evacuation to some distant star, Hawking did offer some hope” by stating that a particle accelerator capable of accomplishing such a feat “would be larger than Earth.” Thus, the CNET reporter quipped, “his fears might be theoretically valid, but their likelihood of actually coming to pass is somewhat smaller than that of the New York Jets winning the next Super Bowl.”
Professor John Ellis, a theoretical physicist working with the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) – the organization responsible for first detecting the Higgs boson – told the Daily Mail’s Ollie Gillman that the discovery of the particle was not the cause of this potential problem, and reiterated that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) used by CERN lacked the energy to trigger such instabilities.
The theory behind the Higgs boson is that it gives mass to other particles, and its existence was proven last year by CERN researchers working at an underground laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. Experts believe that it was the missing piece of the Standard Model, which explains how parts of the known universe interact with one another. Without it, particles would be unable to bind together to create the atoms that are the building blocks of matter.
This isn’t the first time that Hawking has weighed in on the discovery of the Higgs boson. Last November, he lamented the fact that he was disappointed by the Nobel Prize-winning research. Had researchers been unable to find the so-called God particle, Hawking said, physics would have been “far more interesting” because scientists would have been forced to continue searching for a different, perhaps more “exotic” solution to the mass problem.
On a more personal level, he also explained how CERN’s discovery of the Higgs caused him to lose a bet.
“A few weeks ago, Peter Higgs and François Englert shared the Nobel Prize for their work on the boson and they richly deserved it,” Hawking said at an event celebrating the launch of an LHC exhibit at the London Science Museum last year. “But the discovery of the new particle came at a personal cost. I had a bet with Gordon Kane of Michigan University that the Higgs particle wouldn’t be found. The Nobel Prize cost me $100.”
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A Brief History of Time By Stephen Hawking