Stephen Hawking warns: Higgs boson has the potential to obliterate the universe

Stephen Hawking warns: Higgs boson has the potential to obliterate the universe

Hey, scientists. Let us know when you're going to do that, so we can at least throw some decent parties and stop watching our waistlines.

And I might not cut the grass that week.

I guess I should not be skeptical, given that Dr Hawking is far more intelligent than I, but I wonder if perhaps the journalists are exaggerating this whole wacky "destroy the entire universe" thingy. Here's how I look at it. Out there, among the trillions of stars, there must be many civilizations older than ours, who must have discovered Higgs-boson many years ago, perhaps even millions of years ago, with plenty of time to conceive and build colliders large enough to wreak the havoc Hawking envisions, yet the universe is still here.

This week.

So I reckon we might be able to blow up our own planet, maybe much more, but probably not the entire universe.

Of course those two things would be identical from our point of view, wouldn't they?

Or ...

Perhaps the Higgs boson has never been discovered in OUR universe, but our universe itself is just the result of somebody in a very ancient previous universe finding the Higgs boson, tampering with it, and fucking everything up royally in a Big Crunch that eventually became our Big Bang.

On the other hand, Hawking did note that a collider large enough to create such a reaction "would be larger than Earth, and is unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate," (gee, d'ya think? plus we'd need more closet space to store it) so perhaps it simply isn't physically possible ever to create a collider with that capacity, even if the reaction in Hawking's theory is theoretically possible.

Or, more likely, our universe contains additional elements of Physics that remain hidden to us, some other exotic principles that keep Higgs-boson from achieving the instability Hawking conceives.