Hawking’s prediction would need an accelerator bigger than Earth to test, but scientists are excited by the theoretical implications (Discovery Channel)

THE Higgs boson, once hailed as the God particle, may actually have the potential to destroy the universe, Professor Stephen Hawking has warned.

He suggests that, at very high energy levels, the Higgs could suddenly become unstable, causing a “catastrophic vacuum decay” that would cause time and space to collapse.

Such a disaster is, he stresses, very unlikely — and the fact that such a possibility even exists is exciting because it suggests a whole new realm of physics.

Hawking’s comments are contained in his preface to a new book, Starmus, out next month, containing lectures by renowned cosmologists and astronomers first given at a scientific conference of the same name.

In his preface, he says: “The Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it