The bad news is physicists believe the universe could have its own self-destruct button. The good news is it probably won’t get pushed for billions of years.The so-called self-destruct mechanism revolves around the Higgs boson, or “God particle,” which was finally discovered by scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012. In the documentary film, Particle Fever, which chronicled the historic discovery, scientists found that the mass of the particle was 125 GeV. This is significant because it split the difference between two competing schools of thought: one proposed a Higgs mass of 140 GeV, which would support the idea that our universe is situated inside a multiverse; the competing theory posited that the mass would be 115 GeV, which would support a ‘supersymmetry’ model of the universe. The conclusion substantiated neither theory.
Despite solving one of the great mysteries of modern science — shoring up the theoretical underpinnings of three of the four fundamental forces of the universe — the Higgs boson particle struck some physicists as problematic. One of them was Stephen Hawking. Hawking, who lost a $100 bet when the particle was discovered, began assembling a collection of essays called Starmus, which argued the “God Particle” may, in fact, be what destroys the universe.
credit to SkyWatch
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