Could the Higgs mass determine the end of the universe?

You may have heard in the recent media that the world was going to end. Uh, again. Worse still, the devastation wasn't limited to Earth; the whole universe might end. Bad news, right? And you thought 2012 was the year to mark on your calendar.

The science behind the latest prediction isn't particularly new – it was even the plot of a sci-fi novel as long as a decade ago. What is fairly new is the connection to the recently-measured Higgs boson mass at the LHC, but we'll come back to that. For now, we need to talk about metastable (temporarily stable) states.