Stephen Hawking Expresses Concern Over Higgs Boson, ‘God Particle’ Could Destroy Our Universe

Walk along a road in New York City and, sooner or later, you are bound to see someone holding up a sign that talks about the end of the world. But what if that person is famed physicist Stephen Hawking?

In the preface to a new book titled “Starmus,” Hawking talked about his concerns regarding the Higgs particle and the possibility of it destroying our universe. Hawking wrote, "The Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become metastable at energies above 100bn gigaelectronvolts (GeV)."

Hawking talked about what would happen if this were to occur saying, “"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."

However, before anyone starts to panic and think that such an event could be jumpstarted by humans, Hawking continued, “A particle accelerator that reaches 100bn GeV would be larger than Earth, and is unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate."

So we can breathe safely since this particular doomsday scenario is an unlikely one for the foreseeable future. It’s the aliens and artificial intelligence we will have to worry about. Both theories which Hawking has talked about in the past.