What Hawking really meant

Fermilab physicist Don Lincoln explains the idea of a metastable universe, what it has to do with the Higgs boson, and why we're still in good shape. If you’re a science enthusiast, this week you have likely encountered headlines claiming that physicist Stephen Hawking thinks the Higgs boson will cause the end of the universe. This is a jaw-dropping misrepresentation of science. The universe is safe and will be for a very long time—for trillions of years. To understand how abominably Hawking...