London, Sep 8 (IANS): The elusive Higgs boson, also called the "God particle" and discovered by scientists in 2012, has the potential to destroy the universe, eminent scientist Stephen Hawking has warned.

The 'boson' is a sub-atomic particle named after the late Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose.

At very high energy levels, the Higgs boson could cause space and time to collapse suddenly and "we wouldn't see it coming", the former professor of mathematics from the University of Cambridge in Britain explained.

The Higgs Boson is the particle that is theoretically the reason why all matter in the Universe has mass.

The God particle, which gives shape and size to everything that exists, could cause a 'catastrophic vacuum delay' if scientists were to put it under extreme stress, Daily Mail reported.

"The Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become megastable at energies above 100 billionn giga-electron-volts (GeV)," wrote Hawking in the preface to a new book, Starmus, a collection of lectures by scientists and astronomers.

"This could mean that the universe could undergo catastrophic vacuum delay, with the bubble of the true vacuum expanding at the speed of light," the theoretical physicist added.

"This could happen at any time and we wouldn't see it coming," he added.