Renowned scientist Stephen Hawking has warned that the Higgs boson, the so-called God particle, could carry enough power to destroy the entire universe.
The 72-year-old British professor said that at very high energy levels, the Higgs boson, which is believed to give everything we see its shape and size, could become so unstable that it would cause space and time to collapse, the Times reported.
Hawking made his comments in the preface to a new book he contributed to, which is essentially a collection of lectures given by famous scientists and astronomers called ‘Starmus’. He shared his concerns regarding the particle, which he suspects of being unstable and potentially capable of decay.
He wrote that the Higgs “has the worrisome feature that it might become metastable” at very high energies.
“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.”
The Higgs boson was discovered in 2012 by scientists at the Cern particle accelerator in Switzerland, by colliding two beams of protons at high speed.
This was 50 years after the particle was first predicted by British physicist Peter Higgs. In the early 1960s Higgs theorised that the particle and its associated “Higgs field” were the reason things have mass.
Hawking admits that the likelihood of a disaster involving the Higgs is very small since physicists do not have a particle accelerator large enough to create such an experiment.
This was 50 years after the particle was first predicted by British physicist Peter Higgs. In the early 1960s Higgs theorised that the particle and its associated “Higgs field” were the reason things have mass.
Hawking admits that the likelihood of a disaster involving the Higgs is very small since physicists do not have a particle accelerator large enough to create such an experiment.
