Catastrophic vacuum decay will end plant at the speed of light.
By Dileep Thekkethil
BANGALORE: The zest to know more of existence of mass and the evolution of the earth by experimenting with the so-called ‘God Particle’ could take a deadly turn and destroy the earth itself, warns the renowned physicist Stephen Hawking.
Hawking’s warning about the ‘God Particle’ will come true only if it becomes unstable after undergoing experiments at high energy level. According to him, this will result in “catastrophic vacuum decay”, destroying earth at the speed of light.
The doomsday thought of Stephen Hawking appeared in a new book titled “Starmus: 50 Years of Man in Space”, which is a collection of essays and speeches by prominent scientists and astronomers.
Hawking wrote in the preface of the book that “the Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become megastable at energies above 100bn giga-electron-volts (GeV),”
But later down in the preface he sarcastically shuns the possibility of such a catastrophe happening in the near future. He wrote, “A particle accelerator that reaches 100bn GeV would be larger than Earth and is unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate.”
The experiments conducted in Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern, Switzerland, accelerate the speed of sub-atomic particles using magnetic and electrical fields. When the particles reach a speed close to that of light, they are made to collide. The collision will produce tiny elements, and these are called “God Particle.”
The particles that appeared in an experiment conducted in 2012 have largely matched with the prediction of a British scientist Peter Higgs. According to a book released by him in 1960, the particles that appear after the collision are the elements that give mass to matter.
According to Discovery News, the theory about a quantum fluctuation creating vacuum and destroying the universe had existed long before. Scientists have not denied such a possibility, but they don’t think such a catastrophe will soon hit us.
Hawking was always sceptical about the ‘God Particle’ and its discovery. The British physicist had even gone to the extent of betting with Gordon Kane of Michigan University for $100, hoping that the scientists will not discover Higgs Boson or the ‘God Particle’. Though Hawking lost his bet he went on to say that the discovery of the ‘God Particle’ made physics less interesting.