Our world is constantly changing with new trends, new technologies, and new worries about how the world is ending.

Our social media consumption leads us to internalize each random fact we read about aliens walking among us or how the blood moons are predicting our world’s end.

These are all articles we see daily on our timelines, but what if we internalized other stories that most deem crazy but are actually fact? Would we pass these stories off as fiction, or would we continue to seek further for the truth?

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is where physicists and engineers study the fundamental structure of the universe.

CERN uses the world’s largest and most complex scientific instruments to study the basic constituents of matter the fundamental particles. Although you may not have heard of CERN beforehand, you most likely have heard of the World Wide Web. CERN created the World Wide Web (aka, the Internet).

Since the development of the Internet in 1990, CERN has been working on much larger developments. The physicists and engineers have been intently studying and developing the Higgs boson, or the “god particle.”

This “god particle” is very important because what they are trying to recreate and prove is the Big Bang theory. CERN has built a 17-mile circular tunnel in Switzerland where these particles (ions, electrons and protons) are moving at the speed of light.

If these particles do collide with one another, the anticipated Big Bang will be recreated and they can effectively study the matter and antimatter our universe consists of.

Although this is a very fascinating creation, it raises many hairs on the arms of several famous physicists, including Stephen Hawking.

He describes this Higgs boson in his new book that “the universe could undergo catastrophic vacuum decay, with a bubble of the true vacuum expanding at the speed of light.”

For anyone who doesn’t speak the foreign language of science, what Hawking is saying is that if this explosion goes wrong and is uncontrolled in any way, our universe could explode due to the hundreds of nuclear reactors CERN is using.

For obvious reasons I hope CERN is keeping this experiment controlled, but it does raise many questions as to how controlled this experiment truly is.