Science & Technology

Higgs Boson Could Shed Light on How the Universe Might End

The infinite stack of turtles is going to topple, right?

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Physicists confirmed last week that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the -particle physics laboratory in Geneva, had indeed found a Higgs boson last July, marking a culmination of one of the longest and most expensive searches in science. The finding also means that our universe could be doomed to fall apart. "If you use all the physics that we know now and you do what you think is a straightforward calculation, it is bad news," says Joseph Lykken, a theorist who works at the Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois. "It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable."