Higgs boson could destroy the universe

Rather alarming title isn’t it?

You’ve probably already seen something similar in your morning paper. Most major news publications around the world are running this story; and understandably so. The impending end of our universe is big news.

It’s the ultimate good news, bad news scenario. Let’s start with the bad news.

The Bad News

Remember the Higgs boson, or ‘God’ particle that physicists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider identified a couple of years ago, causing scientists everywhere to lose their shit?  Turns our this very, very, very tiny sub-atomic particle; the universe’s ultimate building block that gives mass to all things, could be the undoing of us all.

The really frightening part of all this, is that the prognosticator of doom and gloom isn’t some nut-bar standing on a street corner wearing a sandwich board proclaiming ‘THE END IS NIGH’. The Higgs boson doomsday scenario comes from Stephen Hawking.

He’s run the numbers (I guess there were numbers involved) and had a really good think about it, and is sure enough to go public with his findings that the Higgs boson, at very high energy levels has the potential to destroy the universe. His words…

“The Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become megastable at energies above 100 bn giga-electron-volts (GeV).”

Turns out megastable isn’t very, very stable. It’s very, very unstable…

“This could mean that the universe could undergo catastrophic vacuum decay, with a bubble of the true vacuum expanding at the speed of light.”

Doesn’t sound good.

“This could happen at any time and we wouldn’t see it coming.”

Neither does this.

And the fact that Higgs boson was only discovered, and is only observed by scientists smashing particles together at warp speed to create enormous amounts of energy isn’t reassuring either.

Get rid of it! Throw it away. Lock in the Big Big Brother House.

The Good News

Two pieces of good news.

The first, is that when Higgs boson goes bang the lights (everywhere) will go out so fast we won’t even know it. Like a Muhamad Ali jab.

The second, and this is much better than the first; is that the energy levels required for Higgs boson to go bang are thankfully well beyond the reach of current science.

CERN’s 27 km long Large Hadron Collider puts out 14 TeV. That’s 14 trillion electron volts. 100 billion billion electron volts is bad news territory. Thankfully we’re currently well short of that mark. Hawking does also make this point saying that,

“A particle accelerator that reaches 100bn GeV would be larger than Earth, and is unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate.”

 

Put another way, long before the possibility of a Higgs bosun megastable event our Sun will have run out of hydrogen, swollen up as a Red Giant and engulfed the Earth. We’re talking 5 billion years give or take.

In that time, should you live long enough, you’d have won a few thousand lottery first divisions from your weekly ticket purchase. You may have even seen a Real Time Gaming progressive slot jackpot go off.

You definitely still have time for a rounds of blackjack, roulette or baccarat.