“If The Higgs Goes, Everything Goes”

The most chilling words I heard all year were spoken by theoretical physicist David Kaplan near the conclusion of Mark A. Levinson’s documentary, Particle Fever, which focuses on the “awakening” and implementation of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN:

Super Symmetry could still be true, but it would have to be a very strange version of the theory. And if it’s the Multiverse, well, other universes would be amazing, of course, but it could also mean no other new particles discovered, and then a Higgs with a mass of 125 is right at a critical point for the fate of our universe. Without any other new particles, that Higgs is unstable, it’s temporary. Since the Higgs holds everything together, if the Higgs goes, everything goes. It’s amazing that the Higgs, the center of the standard model, the thing we’ve all been looking for, could also be the thing that destroys everything. The creator and the destroyer.

But, we could discover new particles and then none of that would be true.•

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