(Newswire.net — September 9, 2014) — English theoretical physicist, cosmologist, author and Director of Research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology within the University of Cambridge, Stephen William Hawking, said that the Higgs Boson particle could become unstable and cause “catastrophic vacuum decay” when it reaches high energy levels.
But that’s not the first one. Not only has he warned us that aliens might destroy us, but he’s also been worrying that artificial intelligence might do the same. Now he’s perceiving a threat that might not merely put an end to Earth, but to the whole Universe.
“The God particle”, discovered by physicists during experiments within CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, is a vital ingredient to explaining why things in our world have mass.
However, in a preface to a new book called “Starmus” — a collection of lectures gives by famous scientists and astronomers — Hawking worried that the Higgs Boson might become unstable, the UK’s Sunday Times reports.
Hawking wrote: “The Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become metastable at energies above 100bn gigaelectronvolts (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, “ Hawkins explained. “ This could happen at any time and we wouldn’t see it coming” he said.
Before you prepare your loved ones for a really bad news, Hawking did offer some hope with, it seems, a wry smile: “A particle accelerator that reaches critical amount of energy of 100bn GeV would be larger than Earth, and is unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate.”
Still, you have to wonder about Hawking’s relationship with the Higgs Boson discovery. First, there’s the fact that he lost a $100 bet over its unearthing. Hawking had emphatically argued, and bet, that the Higgs Boson would never be found. Then he mused last year that, now the Higgs Boson had been identified, physics are less interesting.
However, Hawking has made major contributions to the field of general relativity. These derive from a deep understanding of what is relevant to physics and astronomy, and especially from a mastery of wholly new mathematical techniques. Hawking has proved the basic theorems on the laws governing black holes: that stationary solutions of Einstein’s equations with smooth event horizons must necessarily be axisymmetric; and that in the evolution and interaction of black holes, the total surface area of the event horizons must increase.