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Hawking warns ‘God particle’ could destroy the universe

Getty

Getty

Professor Stephen Hawking has used his new book to warn of a potential time and space could collapse in a ‘catastrophic vacuum’.

According to a Sunday Times report, the physicist believes the Higgs boson particle, also called the God particle, could suddenly become unstable, causing the universe to collapse in a vacuum at the speed of light.

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“The Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become metastable at energies above 100bn gigaelectronvolts (GeV),” Hawking writes in the preface of his book Starmus.

“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.”

Despite the dire predictions, Hawking insists that the chance of the vacuum occurring is very unlikely.

The report alleges that a particle accelerator which reaches above 100bn GeV would have to be larger than the earth.

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