British cosmologists are puzzled: they predict that the Universe should not have lasted for more than a second. This startling conclusion is the result of combining the latest observations of the sky with the recent discovery of the Higgs boson. Robert Hogan of King’s College London (KCL) will present the new research on 24 June at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting in Portsmouth.
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The problem is that the BICEP2 results predict that the universe would have received large ‘kicks’ during the cosmic inflation phase, pushing it into the other valley of the Higgs field within a fraction of a second. If that had happened, the universe would have quickly collapsed in a Big Crunch.
“This is an unacceptable prediction of the theory because if this had happened we wouldn’t be around to discuss it” said Hogan, who is a PhD student at KCL and led the study.
So, for once, reality as we experience it counts for something? A good beginning. Well no, really, a good reboot.
Meanwhile, ya gotta love this title:
Higgs boson looks even Higgs-ier:
Now, researchers working with the mammoth CMS particle detector at the LHC have seen the Higgs decaying into fermions—either two tau leptons (above), heavier cousins of the electron, or two bottom quarks, beefy cousins of the up quarks and down quarks that make up protons and neutrons. Reported online yesterday in Nature Physics, the result strongly suggests that, as it lurks “virtually” in the vacuum, the new particle is the universal mass giver that the Higgs is supposed to be.
See also: The Science Fictions series at your fingertips (cosmology).
The quote by Theoretical Physicist Nima Arkani Hamed made after the discovery of the low mass Higgs is a keeper:
“The Universe is inevitable. The Universe is impossible”
Inevitable because the Laws of QM & Relativity leave no other possibility. Impossible because the Laws are impossibly fine-tuned.
Oh well, at least it is a terrifyingly beautiful Universe:)
From the first article
From the second article
Here are a few notes I collected thus far in this area of ‘energy barrier’ and ‘virtual particles’:
As to consciousness touching that energy:
Supplemental note:
Myself, being a Christian Theist, I find it rather comforting to know that it takes an ‘infinite amount of logic to figure out what one stinky tiny bit of space-time is going to do’:
of note: ‘the Word’ in John1:1 is translated from ‘Logos’ in Greek. Logos is the root word from which we derive our modern word logic.