Stephen Hawking warns 'God particle' has potential to 'end world'

Stephen Hawking has recently warned that the God particle or Higgs boson has the potential to obliterate the universe.

The 72-year-old cosmologist said Higgs boson could become unstable at very high energy levels, which would lead to a "catastrophic vacuum decay" causing space and time to collapse and that there would not be any warning to the danger, the Daily Express reported.

Speaking in the preface to a new book called Starmus, the Cambridge-educated scientist said that the Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become megastable at energies above 100bn giga-electron-volts (GeV).

However, Mr Hawking did also mention that the likelihood of such a disaster was unlikely to happen in the near future, but the danger of the Higgs becoming destabilised at high energy was too great to be ignored.

The Higgs boson was discovered in 2012 by scientists at CERN, who operate the world's largest particle physics laboratory.