‘God Particle’ Could Be ‘Catastrophic’ For The Universe: Stephen Hawking

The Higgs Boson, popularly hailed as ‘God particle’, has the potential to destroy the universe, warned professor Stephen Hawking. The researchers believe that the sub-atomic particle has given shape and size to everything that exists.

According to the former Cambridge professor of Mathematics, the Higgs boson could cause space and time suddenly collapse at very high energy levels. The God particle could cause a ‘catastrophic vacuum delay’ if scientists were to put it under extreme stress, said Hawking.

The theoretical physicist’s comments have excited scientists across the globe. Hawking wrote his thoughts on the ‘God particle’ in the preface to a new book named Starmus, a collection of lectures by scientists and astronomers including Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Queen guitarist Brian May.


Professor Hawking wrote: “The Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become megastable at energies above 100bn giga-electron-volts (GeV). 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 at the Cern LHC in Switzerland in 2012 and is believed to be part of the mechanism that gives matter its mass, but scientists do not fully understand it yet.
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