evidence: Why Some Believe The World Actually Ended In 2012 [...] In the Twitter thread, Hinton explained that 2012 was the year when scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) discovered the Higgs boson particle — the so-called "God particle" that Stephen Hawking once warned could result in the universe undergoing a "catastrophic vacuum decay." At this point, there's already one notable inconsistency with the theory; it was only in 2013 when CERN's Large Hadron Collider experiments yielded some evidence that the particle discovered the year prior was indeed the Higgs boson. The operative word, however, is "some" — CERN's article stressed that it would "take time" before scientists could truly confirm the Higgs boson's existence. Speculating that the particle might have "destroyed the universe" as Hawking cautioned, Hinton wrote, "Maybe CERN accidentally created a black hole that sucked us in without us even noticing, and we've just been living in it." But if that did happen, we would have almost certainly noticed, and that would have been the last thing we'd ever notice. According to What If, if our planet was sucked into a black hole, there would be a very good chance of catastrophic earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions as Earth experiences tidal heating and ultimately gets stretched, then split into countless atoms.