Doomsday Is Broker Than You Think

You might have read that Stephen Hawking warned that the Higgs boson particle could trigger a black hole big enough to destroy the universe, and that it “could happen at any time and we wouldn’t see it coming.” However:

But don’t quit your job and empty your bank account just yet. Such a black hole could take trillions of years to topple the universe, and scientists don’t yet have a particle accelerator large enough to create the conditions necessary for such a doomsday.

“A particle accelerator that reaches 100bn GeV [the required giga-electron-volts] would be larger than Earth, and is unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate,” Hawking added, according to the report.

Heh.

I admire Hawking as much for his dry sense of humor — and in the face of such personal adversity — as I do for how far he’s advanced (and explained) physics. Something tells me I’m far from alone in that.