more questions than answers.

Higgs boson scientists: The universe should have collapsed

The science and astrophysics community was ecstatic with the discovery of the Higgs Boson in July of 2012, but two years later the physics its discovery has exposed shows the universe shouldn’t exist.

By Ryan Johnson, Daily Digest News
Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Last year’s discovery of the Higgs boson was thought to answer a number of questions regarding how particles derive their mass. Now, however, it seems the discovery of the elusive particle is raising more questions than answers.
Physicists at King’s College in London now say they have recreated conditions for the Big Bang now with the information from the discovery of the Higgs boson, and they report that the universe should have expanded too quickly and collapsed.
“During the early universe, we expected cosmic inflation — this is a rapid expansion of the universe right after the Big Bang,” said study co-author Robert Hogan, a Ph.D. student in physics at King’s College in London. “This expansion causes lots of stuff to shake around, and if we shake it too much, we could go into this new energy space, which could cause the universe to collapse.”
While the data shows the universe should not exist, it clearly does, leading some to question exactly how the findings should be interpreted.
“We are here talking about it,” Hogan told Live Science. “That means we have to extend our theories to explain why this didn’t happen.”
A telescope in the Antarctic called Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization (BICEP¬2) –so named for its extraordinary detection capabilities —is believed to have detected slivers of cosmic inflation in background microwave radiation that permeates the universe. The data collected by BICEP¬2 could provide further evidence as to why the Big Bang occurred and why the universe remains stable.
Already some scientists have put forth theories as to how to interpret the Higgs data. One theory holds that supersymmetry, the theory that all currently known particles have superpartner particles, may be partly responsible. Hogan believes with more powerful particle accelerators—more intense than the Large Hadron Collider which found the Higgs Boson—these particles may one day be discovered.
The discovery of the Higgs Boson has already led to many apocalyptic visions by researchers, who believe out of its fundamental instability, the universe should collapse in a few billion years. For now, scientists will have to mold and adapt their theories to explain why we’ve been here for the first 13.8 billion years.