British physicist Stephen Hawking is all smiles after his flight at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral
British physicist Stephen Hawking is all smiles after his flight at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida April 26, 2007. Hawking took a flight on Thursday that gave the renowned scientist, who is confined to a wheelchair, a taste of the weightlessness of space. Reuters/Charles W Luzier

Stephen Hawking, in the preface of a new book Starmus, warns that the "God particle" (Higgs boson) would destroy the universe. The book is a collection of lectures and essays by astronomers and researchers. The theory of the "God particle" ending the universe is that a quantum fluctuation would create a vacuum bubble that would expand through space and wipe out the universe. This theory has long existed.

The Higgs boson, referred to as the "God particle," is a tiny particle discovered in 2012. It strongly supports the Standard Model of particle physics and indicates towards the existence of the Higgs field, an invisible energy field present throughout the universe that fills other particles with mass. Scientists measured the mass of the particle in 2013, and the calculations revealed that it may cause the end of the universe.

Hawking said that the Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become metastable at energies above 100 [billion] gigaelectronvolts (GeV). He further explained, "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."

He said that a particle that reaches 100bn GeV would definitely be larger than Earth and would be "unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate."

Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, said that it would take 10 to a million, billion years for it to happen. During his lecture at the SETI Institute, he also said that, on the other hand, it is possible that it may have already happened and the bubble may be on its way. "And you won't know because it's going at the speed of light so there's not going to be any warning," he added.

The Sunday Times reported that the end of the world is not any time soon and the entire situation is unlikely to happen. But the discovery uncovers a new realm of physics and hence is exciting.