Materialist science eats it’s own.
In a preface to new book, the famed physicist fears the Higgs Boson becoming unstable and causing a “catastrophic vacuum decay.” But how likely is that really?
Stephen Hawking seems to have turned into the man with the sandwich board that says: “The end is nigh.”
Not only has he warned us that aliens might destroy us, but he’s also been worrying that artificial intelligence might do the same.
Now he’s perceiving a threat that might not merely put an end to Earth, but to the whole Universe.
As the UK’s Sunday Times reports, Hawking is worried about the God particle. This, discovered by physicists during experiments within CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, is a vital ingredient to explaining why things in our world have mass.
However, in a preface to a new book called “Starmus” — a collection of lectures gives by famous scientists and astronomers — Hawking worried that the Higgs Boson might become unstable.
He wrote: “The Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become metastable at energies above 100bn gigaelectronvolts (GeV).”
What might this lead to? Hawkins 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.”
Before you prepare your loved ones for an evacuation to some distant star, Hawking did offer some hope with, it seems, a wry smile: “A particle accelerator that reaches 100bn GeV would be larger than Earth, and is unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate.”
In essence, then, his fears might be theoretically valid, but their likelihood of actually coming to pass is somewhat smaller than that of the New York Jets winning the next Super Bowl.
Still, you have to wonder about Hawking’s relationship with the Higgs Boson discovery. First, there’s the fact that he lost a $100 bet over its unearthing. Then he mused last year that now the Higgs Boson had been identified, physics has become less interesting.
However, given that he believes we only have perhaps 1,000 years left on Earth anyway, it’s as well to explore every possible scenario, before the robots and algorithms secure minds of their own and, as their first step, eliminate us all.
4 Comments on “Stephen Hawking: God particle could wipe out the universe”
The guy’s losing his marbles. What he’s talking about didn’t happen in the last 10 billion years, and there’s no evidence of it happening in the near future. Instead of trying to replace Nostrodamus or the delphic oracle, maybe he should put his brain to better use by creating practical solutions that will help solve global problems.
There is a new available narrative but not one that physics alone can deliver. One thing we work against is our beliefs about disciplines-the false borders we have utilized to create turf and turf masters!
Silly humans, once you extricate from a field, learn from multiple visions-then one can see the patterns and an entirely new story emerges. The linear construct was important as a way to define and practice our reason, now it seems prudent to get out of our own way, deconstruct our myths and stories -the lot handed down over centuries- and get to new heart of”matter,” the energy 🙂 that we can better utilize once we understand and believe that we are more than the old roles allowed us to be! This is conscious evolution ..after all we have come a long way thanks to those hand me downs..aha another great juxtapose!
The premise that a real vacuum really exists is itself questionable. Nature abhors a vacuum. What is conventionally termed as “vacuum” is in fact space teeming with unbelievable Energy. One cubic cm of “empty” space has more Energy than all the manifest Universe put together. I think Astronomy, Particle Physics get into the realm of fertile imaginations in matters of conjectures.
everybody knows real vacuum only exists outside the sphere of cosmos.