Gravity may have saved the universe

February 8, 2015 7:00pm by


Source: Phys.org

From Phys.org:

New research by a team of European physicists could explain why the universe did not collapse immediately after the Big Bang.

Studies of the Higgs particle – discovered at CERN in 2012 and responsible for giving mass to all particles – have suggested that the production of Higgs particles during the accelerating expansion of the very early universe (inflation) should have led to instability and collapse.

Scientists have been trying to find out why this didn’t happen, leading to theories that there must be some new physics that will help explain the origins of the universe that has not yet been discovered. Physicists from Imperial College London, and the Universities of Copenhagen and Helsinki, however, believe there is a simpler explanation.

In a new study in Physical Review Letters, the team describe how the spacetime curvature – in effect, gravity – provided the stability needed for the universe to survive expansion in that early period. The team investigated the interaction between the Higgs particles and gravity, taking into account how it would vary with energy.

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  1. JackWayne commented on Feb 8

    Useful to learn that the Higgs Boson was unequivocally discovered in 2012. It’s odd that I don’t remember it that way.

    • Fact Seeker commented on Feb 8

      CERN: On 4 July 2012, the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider announced they had each observed a new particle in the mass region around 126 GeV. This particle is consistent with the Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model. The Higgs boson, as proposed within the Standard Model, is the simplest manifestation of the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism. Other types of Higgs bosons are predicted by other theories that go beyond the Standard Model.

      Can you really be that goddamned lazy? Just try googling it, instead of being a clueless dolt.

      How embarrassing to be you . . ..

  2. JackWayne commented on Feb 8

    In fact doesn’t this theory throw the steady state (always expanding) universe theory into disarray?
    Tsk! Poor entropy. Left out in the cold….

  4. sellstop commented on Feb 8

    I was encouraged that there is inflation at the end of the tunnel. It is destiny after all….

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