Famous English physicist Stephen Hawking has released a new collection of essays in which he puts forth a theory that has been going around the scientific world for a while: that the Higgs boson, popularly called the 'God' particle, might be responsible for the eventual destruction of the known universe.
Hawking, the theoretical physicist who has turned into a sort of science megastar over the course of decades, warns in his new book 'Starmus: 50 Years of Man in Space' that the Higgs boson could possibly become metastable at 100bn giga-electron-volts (GEV). In other words, the particle's potentially unstable and could undergo vacuum decay; as he explains it, a bubble of the vacuum would expand at light speed. Because of its high speed, this would mean we wouldn't be able to see it coming.
Before the official discovery of the Higgs boson at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, Professor Hawking was outspoken about his incredulity: he bet a hundred dollars the particle would never be discovered. Once he was proven wrong, he paid up his debt and declared publicly that for him physics had become less interesting after this theory was proven.
The theory proposed by professor Hawking in his new book's preface is hardly a new one. While scientists have talked of a possible 'Higgs boson doomsday', they have also agreed this would happen millions of years from now. Yahoo News reports that Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, said during his lecture at the SETI Institute last week that this would most likely take place "ten to the hundred years from now" (which means a 1 followed by a hundred zeroes) or, if in any case the bubble is already on our way, we would be unable to see it coming. Still, a 'doomsday' scenario for our universe is still unlikely at this time.
