back to article Hawking: Higgs boson in a BIG particle punisher could DESTROY UNIVERSE

Once upon a time, Stephen Hawking was so sure the Higgs Boson was a fantasy that he bet $100* against its discovery. But now the British boffin has dramatically changed his mind, warning that the so-called god particle could go rogue and destroy the entire universe. Clearly annoyed that Peter Higgs, who predicted the existence …

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  1. smudge
    Trollface

    George Osborne is the saviour of the Universe

    Hawking: "...unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate."

    Osborne: "See, I told you we needed those austerity measures!".

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: George Osborne is the saviour of the Universe

      ... in other news, another Al-Qaeda splinter group, calling itself Al-Qaeda-with-an-interest-in-science-in-order-to-beat-the-Infidel-at-their-own-game, announced on Twitter that it has launched a programme to kidnap any scientist with the slightest clue about time travel in order to perpetrate a 'dead cert' investment fraud to raise the massive funding needed to create a particle accelerator big enough create the Ultimate Suicide Bomb, thus cleansing the entire universe of the accursed Infidel, Jews, the Danish, competitors and all temptations at a stroke.

      1. Andus McCoatover
        Black Helicopters

        Re: George Osborne is the saviour of the Universe

        Has Al-Qaeda-with-an-interest-in-science-in-order-to-beat-the-Infidel-at-their-own-game commenced a "Kickstarter" account? If £20 gets you 46 virgins, stick me down!

        Oh, wait - what's that ominous "chop chop chop" I hear in the sky above my house?

        1. Ted Treen
          Go

          Re: George Osborne is the saviour of the Universe

          "...If £20 gets you 46 virgins, stick me down!.."

          OK, infidel:- but you do not get to choose the gender of the virgins.

          Or the species.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: George Osborne is the saviour of the Universe

            Re: George Osborne is the saviour of the Universe

            "...If £20 gets you 46 virgins, stick me down!.."

            OK, infidel:- but you do not get to choose the gender of the virgins.

            Or the species.

            Any quantity of virgins over 3 is unlikely going to be *heaven* anyway. Anyone who has a few sisters knows that the recipient is not going to enjoy himself very much..

            1. Michael Dunn
              Joke

              Re: George Osborne is the saviour of the Universe @ AC '6 hours ago'

              You wrote: "Any quantity of virgins over 3 is unlikely going to be *heaven* anyway. Anyone who has a few sisters knows that the recipient is not going to enjoy himself very much.."

              And think of 46 mothers-in-law!

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: George Osborne is the saviour of the Universe

          @Andus McCoatover

          Aiieeee Andus! Verily you are blessed to support the cause, and your generosity shall be rewarded in the afterlife! For which we will throw in an 'early adopter' five-virgin bonus pack, a copy of our handy guide "Wahabbi Fundamentalism for fun and profit in 42 easy steps (Lite version) - the sceptics edition", and a subscription to our house monthly magazine "Jihadi Kewl" which is packed full of helpful tips on Fundamentalist fashion, misogyny, lobotomy and subverting scientific know-how to defeat the infidel!

          PS - Don't worry those are OUR helicopters!

    2. John Brown (no body) Silver badge
      Mushroom

      Re: George Osborne is the saviour of the Universe

      GEORGE'S ALIVE?

      Best Flash icon available --->

    3. Wzrd1 Silver badge

      Re: George Osborne is the saviour of the Universe

      Hawking: "...unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate."

      Fortunately, said funding has already been provided, courtesy of many millions of neutron stars and those pesky supernovae.

      I stand here, before you now, truthfully unafraid. Why? Because I believe something you do not? No, I stand here without fear because I remember. I remember that I am here not because of the path that lies before me but because of the path that lies behind me. I remember that for 13 billion years we have fought these machines, errr, survived such energetic events. And after Hawking's pronouncement, I remember that which matters most... We are still here!*

      *Liberally mutilated from a stolen passage from the Matrix Reloaded.

    4. dan1980

      Re: George Osborne is the saviour of the Universe

      Hawking: "...unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate."

      I'd swear he said much the same thing in one of his books.

  2. DropBear
    Pint

    The Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become metastable

    ...in that case, we better have some beer bottle caps ready to wedge under one of its feet to make it stable again before it's too late! Prepare we must! To the pub, people!!!

    1. stucs201

      re: bottle caps

      Thats a job for beer mats.

    2. Khaptain Silver badge

      >Prepare we must! To the pub, people!!!

      For the end of the world I couldn't think of a better place to be. Ford Prefect was obviously very up to date on these matters

    3. JeffyPoooh
      Pint

      "...bottle caps ready to wedge under one of its feet..."

      No. Given some dubious assumption, you can simply turn it by 45 degrees to achieve stability.

  3. MacroRodent

    Hmm,

    If some particle collision can trigger such an intergalactic doomsday, then it should already have happened, since the universe contains objects like black holes, supernovas, magnetars etc that spout more energetic particle beams than we can ever hope to generate. So I'm not worried.

    1. smartypants

      Perhaps it already has happened!

      All that light from the sky... pre-cataclysm light.

      Maybe tomorrow we find out!

      (I won't let this spoil my dinner though)

    2. Valerion

      Re: Hmm,

      Maybe it already has. It then expands outwards at the speed of light. So if happened 200,000 light years away, 200,000 years ago it should be night night time any time now.

      1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

        Re: Hmm,

        Mmmm....you forgot to take into account the expansion of the universe so although the effect is moving at the speed of light, the expanding affected zone itself is moving away from us by whatever the universe expansion rate is. By my estimates, that will be next Tuesday rather than tomorrow.

      2. Vociferous

        Re: Hmm,

        Maybe it already has. It then expands outwards at the speed of light

        And thanks to the accelerating expansion of the universe, which is not limited by the speed of light, odds are such a bubble expanding at the speed of light will never reach us.

        That expansion will eventually rip every atom in the universe to shreds, but you can't get everything.

        But, more to the point, the fact that the universe still exists means that Hawking is wrong. The universe carries out these high-energy experiments at billions of neutron stars and black holes every instant.

    3. This post has been deleted by its author

      1. Mike Pellatt

        Re: Hmm,

        Still, at least he hasn't fallen for something like the schoolboy error that Prof. Laithwaite did over gyroscopes, and think he's discovered perpetual motion.

        Yet.

    4. GrumpenKraut
      Thumb Up

      Re: Hmm,

      That! Have an upvote.

      1. Will Godfrey Silver badge
        Facepalm

        Re: Hmm,

        I would have thought the fact he said the particle accellerator would have to be bigger than the Earth, and he also cast doubts on available funding suggets he wasn't being entirely serious.

  4. Dave 126

    Good news, everyone!

    Prof Farnsworth:

    "Why, to do what you are suggesting would require some some of DOOMSDAY WEAPON! Oh well, I supose I can spare one..."

  5. tkioz

    Not overly worried about the Higgs after all how many grains of sands does it take to destroy a planet?

    [i]One at sufficient velocity. [/i]

    1. H.Winter
      Headmaster

      Intrigued

      I'm intrigued, how would one calculate the velocity needed for a grain of sand to destroy a planet?

      1. Chemist

        Re: Intrigued

        "how would one calculate the velocity needed for a grain of sand to destroy a planet?"

        Easy-ish. Any sized grain of sand if it could reach c would have infinite energy. So just crank the speed control back just enough to have sufficient energy to destroy a planet.

        1. bigtimehustler

          Re: Intrigued

          This is not guaranteed though, unless you believe you can get the grain of sand to travel faster than the speed of light, if the amount of energy required would be calculated to required speeds in excess, then it may not be possible.

      2. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

        Re: Intrigued

        how would one calculate the velocity needed for a grain of sand to destroy a planet?

        The simplest way is to ask Randall Munroe. He's an expert on doomsday mathematics.

  6. alain williams Silver badge

    Don't tell the Daleks

    This sounds like an excellent story for Dr Who - where the good Dr can, yet again, foil a darstadly plot by the tin pepper pots!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: foil a dastadly plot by the tin pepper pots!

      It'd certainly make a change from all that invading and stuff they mostly do. And we'd get to see what a Science Dalek looks like ...

      (i.e nothing like a sexy dalek nun dalek, I'll bet)

  7. SnowCrash

    It's probably already happened but we just didn't notice..

    1. Any mouse Cow turd

      I'm sure we have noticed - how do you think our universe popped into existence....

      1. TitterYeNot

        "I'm sure we have noticed - how do you think our universe popped into existence...."

        No, I think you'll find that was the Universe Mark 1. Current estimates are that we're now up to at least Mark 9 - why else do you think life seems to get even more bizarre and inexplicable as time goes on?

        1. thondwe

          Mark 9 - an odd number - Marks 2,4, 6 and 8 were rubbish! So this must be a goody?

        2. JeffyPoooh
          Pint

          Universe Mark 1 to Mark 9

          This is the Windows 8.1 of Universes. Good underpinnings, but what's on the Surface is just bizarre.

          1. Al Black

            Re: Universe Mark 1 to Mark 9

            My advice is to view it in Desktop mode!

  8. stucs201

    larger than Earth, and is unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate

    And the size relative to the Earth or our current budgets affects more advanced dyson sphere building (*) civilisations building one how? Admitedly we can't do much about it if they do.

    (*) example only, the practicalities of that is a separate discussion.

  9. Anthony Hegedus Silver badge

    Maybe we should build a massive cyclotron on Mars, so it only destroys the Martian universe and not ours

  10. Jon Green
    Boffin

    Shows what the tabloids know...

    Energy to (supposedly) get Higgs boson metastable: 100,000,000 TeV.

    Collision energy of LHC after this year's upgrade: 14 TeV.

    The Universe is safe from us for the moment...

  11. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
    Mushroom

    "I WILL DO ANYTHING TO STAY IN THE NEWS"

    Seriously, shut the fuck up, Prof.

    Rehashing old physics ego-vertisements, Might/Could/Bes and pulling random energy levels out of the hat just doesn't cut it.

    Peter Woit, February 21, 2013:

    At the AAAS 2013 meeting in Boston this past week [Feb. 2013], a press conference was held to update the media on the Higgs. What the media got from the press conference was the news that the Higgs may spell doom, unless supersymmetry saves us. This isn’t just doom for HEP physics research, it’s doom for the entire universe:

    “At some point, billions of years from now, it’s all going to be wiped out…. The universe wants to be in a different state, so eventually to realise that, a little bubble of what you might think of as an alternate universe will appear somewhere, and it will spread out and destroy us,” Lykken said at AAAS.

    This is based on a renormalization group calculation extrapolating the Higgs effective potential to its value at energies many many orders of magnitude above LHC energies. To believe the result you have to believe that there is no new physics and we completely understand everything exactly up to scales like the GUT or Planck scale. Fan of the SM that I am, that’s too much for even me to swallow as plausible.

    If you are being kept awake by the Higgs metastability issue, you’ll want to know the Higgs mass as accurately as possible. The rumor from ATLAS is that the difference in best fit masses between the gamma-gamma and ZZ channels has narrowed, with gamma-gamma moving up slightly to 126.8 GeV, ZZ quite a bit, to 124.3 GeV.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "I WILL DO ANYTHING TO STAY IN THE NEWS"

      > the difference in best fit masses between the gamma-gamma and ZZ channels has narrowed, with gamma-gamma moving up slightly to 126.8 GeV, ZZ quite a bit, to 124.3 GeV

      Forget gamma-gamma, what does this mean for ZZ9 plural Z alpha?

    2. Psyx

      Re: "I WILL DO ANYTHING TO STAY IN THE NEWS"

      Dude, as per the story, he wrote the comment in a book.

      It's not HIS fault news sources jumped on the quote.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "I WILL DO ANYTHING TO STAY IN THE NEWS"

      The AAAS cannot possibly be a serious organisation,they keep asking me to become a member.

  12. Graham Jordan

    In other news

    Prof Hawkins accepts job as the Daily Mail headline creator.

    1. FartingHippo
      Alert

      Re: In other news

      Immigrant Bosons On Benefits Cause Cancer And Falling House Prices

    2. Hargrove

      Re: In other news

      End of universe imminent.

      Sacred White Boson found in South Dakota accidentally "fracked" in gas well explosion.

  13. Andy The Hat Silver badge

    "... clobbered to death by a manmade virus or even aliens."

    I'm glad it was probably just me who misread this as 'marmalade virus' - the very thought of being shredded ... perhaps by an 'even alien' ... brrr ... chill and spine interfacing time ...

    1. I ain't Spartacus Gold badge
      Coat

      Yeah, you want to watch out for the marmalade virus, it's got a 100% mortality rate. If you get it, you're toast.

      The other problem with it, is how easily it spreads.

      1. Jes.e

        Re: marmalade virus

        Alas.. I have only one upvote..

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