‘Finding the God particle could destroy the universe’
10 Sept 2014 5:06 AM IST
At very high energy levels, the Higgs boson could cause space and time suddenly collapse - and ‘we wouldn’t see it coming’, the former Cambridge professor of mathematics says.
The God particle, which gives shape and size to everything that exists, could cause a ‘catastrophic vacuum delay’ if scientists were to put it under extreme stress.
A disaster like this is very unlikely for the time being as physicists do not have a particle accelerator large enough create such an experiment, but Prof Hawking’s comments have excited scientists, the
Sunday Times reported.
The theoretical physicist wrote his thoughts on the Higgs boson in the preface to a new book, Starmus, a collection of lectures by scientists and astronomers including Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Queen guitarist Brian May.
Prof 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 professor did add sarcastically, however, that such an event is unlikely 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.’
Professor John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at Cern, said: ‘One thing should be made clear. The discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) did not cause this problem, and collisions at the LHC could not trigger the instability, because their energies are far too low.’
The God particle, which gives shape and size to everything that exists, could cause a ‘catastrophic vacuum delay’ if scientists were to put it under extreme stress.
A disaster like this is very unlikely for the time being as physicists do not have a particle accelerator large enough create such an experiment, but Prof Hawking’s comments have excited scientists, the
Sunday Times reported.
The theoretical physicist wrote his thoughts on the Higgs boson in the preface to a new book, Starmus, a collection of lectures by scientists and astronomers including Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Queen guitarist Brian May.
Prof 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 professor did add sarcastically, however, that such an event is unlikely 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.’
Professor John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at Cern, said: ‘One thing should be made clear. The discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) did not cause this problem, and collisions at the LHC could not trigger the instability, because their energies are far too low.’
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