`God Particle Could Destroy the Universe´, - warns Stephen Hawking

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The 'God Particle' discovered by scientists in 2012 has the power to destroy the universe, Professor Stephen Hawking has warned.

The physicist said that at very high energy levels the Higgs boson could become unstable, causing a "catastrophic vacuum decay" that would cause space and time to collapse.

The possibility of this happening is extremely unlikely, he stresses, as scientists do not yet have a particle accelerator large enough to create such conditions.

He makes the comments in a new book Starmus: 50 Years of Man in Space, a collection of essays by scientists and astronomers.

"The Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become megastable at energies above 100bn giga-electron-volts (GeV)," Professor Hawking writes.

"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."

Accidental armageddon won't be soon

Hawking adds that this is unlikely to happen in the near future.

He said: "A particle accelerator that reaches 100bn GeV would be larger than Earth, and is unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate," he notes, sarcastically.

He said that the potential of the Higgs boson particle to destruct at high energy levels could offer important insights, as it "places important constraints on the evolution of the universe".

Particle accelerators increase the speed at which sub-atomic particles travel using magnetic and electrical fields then collide them. The most famous is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern, Switzerland.

They are used so scientists can spot tiny particles which are detached in the collisions.

The Higgs boson was discovered in Cern's LHC in Switzerland in 2012.

Debris that unexpectedly appeared after particle collisions matched the predictions of British scientist Peter Higgs in the 1960s.

The Higgs bosun particle is believed to be responsible for giving matter its mass, but scientists do not yet fully understand its role.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/god-parti...-warns-stephen-hawking-131756210.html#2PJAsB4
 
Prof Matt Strassler had a good blog article on this, helping us read through some of the media hype out there. Here's a link and some relevant snippets:

http://profmattstrassler.com/2014/09/10/will-the-higgs-boson-destroy-the-universe/#more-7739

Recently, physicists have been writing about this possibility because if (a) you ASSUME that the types of particles that we’ve discovered so far are the only ones that affect the Higgs field, and (b) you ASSUME that there are no other important forces that affect the Higgs field other than the ones we know, then you can calculate, with some degree of reliability (though there is a debate about that degree) that (1) the Higgs field could lower the energy of the universe by suddenly jumping from ON to WAY WAY SUPER-DUPER ON, and (2) that the time we’d have to wait for it to do so spontaneously isn’t infinite. It would do this in two steps: first a bubble of WAY WAY ON Higgs field would form (via the curious ability of quantum mechanics to make the improbable happen, rarely), and then that bubble would expand and sweep across the universe, destroying everything in its path.

Ok. First, should you buy the original assumptions? No. It’s just humans assuming that what we currently know is all there is to know; since when has that been true? Second, even if you do buy them, should you worry about the conclusion? No.

The calculation is hard, the answer highly uncertain, and worse, the whole thing is profoundly dependent on the ASSUMPTIONS. In fact, if the assumptions are slightly wrong — if there are other particles and forces that affect the Higgs field, or if there is more than one Higgs-like field in nature — then the calculation could end up being way off from the truth.
 
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Speaking of 'destroying the world', have you seen this Cerntruth website? It says when the lhc starts up again in 2015, there will be 70% chance of strangelets and black holes. It also says that the CERN people have been lying to the public about there being a low risk of black holes and stuff. http://cerntruth.wordpress.com/
 
Speaking of 'destroying the world', have you seen this Cerntruth website? It says when the lhc starts up again in 2015, there will be 70% chance of strangelets and black holes. It also says that the CERN people have been lying to the public about there being a low risk of black holes and stuff. http://cerntruth.wordpress.com/
Even if there were black holes, there wouldn't be enough initial mass to grow the singularity. It would almost instantly collapse.
 
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