ON THE UPSIDE, IT WOULD STILL DO LESS DAMAGE THAN OBAMA HAS: Stephen Hawking Fears Higgs Boson Doomsday, and He’s Not Alone. “The Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become metastable at energies above 100 [billion] gigaelectronvolts (GeV). … 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.”