When Stephen Hawking Burps, The World Media Goes Crazy!

Yes, I categorize this as a burp, which reveals how uninteresting and how little importance I put on this piece of news that has somehow garnered such widespread attention.

Whenever the name Stephen Hawking and the phrase "destruction of our universe" appear on the same sentence, that is just an incendiary combination that usually caused a world-wide explosion (pun intended). That's what happened when Hawking said that the Higgs boson that was discovered a couple of years ago at the LHC will result in the destruction of our universe.

My first reaction when I read this was: YAWN!

But of course, the public, and the popular media, ran away with it. After all, what more eye-catching headline can one make beyond something like "Higgs boson destroys the universe - Hawking". However, I think those strangelets in the LHC collisions that were going to form micro blackholes that will swallow our universe were here first, and they demand that they'd be the first to destroy our universe.

There is an opinion piece on the CNN webpage that addressed this issue. When CNN had to invite someone to write an opinion piece of a physics news, you know that it had gotten way too much attention!

So, the simplified argument goes like something like this -- the Higgs particle pervades space roughly uniformly, with a relatively high mass -- about 126 times that of the proton (a basic building block of atoms). Theoretical physicists noted even before the Higgs discovery that its relatively high mass would mean lower energy states exist. Just as gravity makes a ball roll downhill, to the lowest point, so the universe (or any system) tends toward its lowest energy state. If the present universe could one day transition to that lower energy state, then it is unstable now and the transition to a new state would destroy all the particles that exist today.

This would happen spontaneously at one point in space and time and then expand throughout the universe at the speed of light. There would be no warning, because the fastest a warning signal could travel is also at the speed of light, so the disaster and the warning would arrive at the same time.

That was the pedestrian description of what Hawking is talking about. But don't just stop there or you'll miss the CONTEXT of the probability of this happening.

 

Back to the universe. Whether the existence of Higgs boson means we're doomed depends on the mass of another fundamental particle, the top quark. It's the combination of the Higgs and top quark masses that determine whether our universe is stable.

Experiments like those at the Large Hadron Collider allow us to measure these masses. But you don't need to hold your breath waiting for the answer. The good news is that such an event is very unlikely and should not occur until the universe is many times its present age.

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So don't lose any sleep over possible danger from the Higgs boson, even if the most famous physicist in the world likes to speculate about it. You're far more likely to be hit by lightning than taken out by the Higgs boson.

 See what I mean when I said that I yawned when I first read about Hawking's speculation?

Zz.