"This could happen at any time and we wouldn’t see it coming," the British physicist said
The elusive ‘God particle’ discovered by scientists in 2012 has the
potential to destroy the universe, famed British physicist Stephen
Hawking has warned.
According to Mr. Hawking, 72, at very high energy levels the Higgs
boson, which gives shape and size to everything that exists, could
become unstable.
This, he said, could cause a “catastrophic vacuum decay” that would lead space and time to collapse, Express.co.uk reported.
“The Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become
megastable at energies above 100bn giga-electron-volts (GeV),” Hawking
wrote in the preface to a new book called Starmus.
“This could mean that the universe could undergo catastrophic vacuum
decay, with a bubble of the true vacuum expanding at the speed of light.
“This could happen at any time and we wouldn’t see it coming,” said Mr. Hawking.
The Higgs boson, also known as the God particle, was discovered in 2012
by scientists at CERN — who operate the world’s largest particle physics
laboratory.
Hawking said the likelihood of such a disaster is unlikely to happen in
the near future, however, the danger of the Higgs becoming destabilised
at high energy is too great to be ignored.
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