If you’re a science enthusiast, this week you have likely encountered headlines claiming that physicist Stephen Hawking thinks the Higgs boson will cause the end of the universe.
This is a jaw-dropping misrepresentation of science. The universe is safe and will be for a very long time—for trillions of years.
To understand how abominably Hawking’s words have been twisted, first we need to understand his statement. To paraphrase just a little, Hawking said that in a world in which the Higgs boson and another fundamental particle—the top quark—have the masses that scientists have measured them to have, the universe is in a metastable state.
An sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial civilization could conceivably build an accelerator large enough to potentially destroy the Universe. But why would they? To read more, click here.