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’s words have been twisted, first we need to understand his statement. To paraphrase just a little, Hawking said that in a world in which the Higgs boson and another fundamental particle — the top quark — have the masses that scientists have measured them to have, the universe is in a metastable state.

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