This has been described as a kind of 'cosmic treacle' across the universe.Īs particles passed through it, they picked up mass, giving them size and shape and allowing them to form the atoms that make up you, everything around you and everything in the universe. Scientists believe that a fraction of a second after the Big Bang that gave birth to the universe, an invisible energy field, called the Higgs field, formed. which I think is the rational way to pose it.The 'God Particle', also known as the Higgs boson, was a missing piece in the jigsaw for physicists in trying to understand how the universe works. 'They say all the things that Hawking said,' Mack says, 'but they pose it as, 'This clearly indicates we need new physics. When two physicists published a paper documenting the Higgs potential conundrum in March, their conclusion was that an explanation lies beyond the Standard Model, not that the universe may collapse at any time. Physicists know there are parts of the model missing mysteries like quantum gravity and dark matter that still defy explanation. What's more likely, Mack says, is that there is some new physics not yet understood that makes our vacuum stable. By then, the sun and Earth and you and I and Stephen Hawking will be a distant memory, so it's probably not worth losing sleep over it. And while that is theoretically possible, predictions show that if it were to happen, it's not likely for billions of billions of years.

If our universe was in fact in a meta-stable state, it could quantum tunnel through the barrier to the vacuum on the other side with no warning, destroying everything in an instant. In the quantum world, where the smallest of particles interact, it's possible for a particle on one side of a barrier to suddenly appear on the other side of the barrier without actually going through it, a phenomenon known as quantum tunneling. Of course, there's always the quantum world to consider, and that's where things always get weirder. 'But then they tell you 20 years ago it was in a furnace.' If it didn't combust in the furnace, it's not likely to combust sitting in your hand. 'Imagine that somebody hands you a piece of paper and says, 'This piece of paper has the potential to spontaneously combust,' and so you might be worried,' Mack says. Particles in cosmic rays from space also regularly collide with these kinds of high energies, and yet the vacuum hasn't collapsed (otherwise, we wouldn't be here). But, Mack says, the universe already experienced such high energies during the period of inflation just after the big bang. The first would occur via a huge energy boost, the 100 billion GeVs Hawking mentions. There are two ways for a meta-stable state to fall off into the true vacuum-one classical way, and one quantum way. 'There are a couple of really good reasons to think that's not the end of the story,' Mack says. This is the catastrophic vacuum decay in Hawking's warning, though he is not the first to posit the idea. That value seemed to reveal that the universe exists in what's known as a meta-stable vacuum state, or false vacuum, a state that's stable for now but could slip into the 'true' vacuum at any time. Once physicists began to close in on the mass of the Higgs boson, they were able to work out the Higgs potential. In this analogy, the Higgs potential is like the voltage, determining the value of the field. The Higgs field permeates the entire universe, and the Higgs boson is an excitation of that field, just like an electron is an excitation of an electric field. What Hawking is talking about here is not the Higgs boson but what's called the Higgs potential, which are 'totally different concepts,' says Katie Mack, a theoretical astrophysicist at Melbourne University. This could happen at any time and we wouldn't see it coming.' This could mean that the universe could undergo catastrophic vacuum decay, with a bubble of the true vacuum expanding at the speed of light. According to The Australian, the preface reads in part: 'The Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become metastable at energies above 100 gigaelectronvolts (GeV). That's what many reports in the media said earlier this week, quoting a preface Hawking wrote to a book called Starmus. The famed theorist expressed his disappointment that nothing more unusual was found, calling the discovery 'a pity in a way.' But did he ever say the Higgs could destroy the universe? In July 2012, when scientists at CERN's Large Hadron Collider culminated decades of work with their discovery of the Higgs boson, most physicists celebrated.

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