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The Higgs boson is delightfully stirring the mud puddle in the astrophysics community even after found! Instead of clearing everything up, now more questions have to be asked.
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) presents the new research on June 24 at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting in Portsmouth.
The controversy seems to be about one of the predictions of BICEP2 allegedly being observed, and if so, Robert Hogan seems to think that if they did see this effect, then the universe would not exist today, it would have went straight to 'Big Crunch' right after the 'Big Bang'.
Pop the corn, this may be a good one!
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday June 24 2014, @11:41PM
The big bang idea is every bit as infantile as creation, in fact, it's creation repackaged by scientists. It must have been difficult for primitive Western man to wrap their heads around the idea that matter/energy has always existed in some form or interaction.
(Score: 2) by khallow on Wednesday June 25 2014, @01:09AM
How long is "always exists"? Because according to current observation, "always existed" seems to have a shelf-life of roughly 13.7 billion years.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by tangomargarine on Wednesday June 25 2014, @02:55PM
If time is an artifact of the physical universe, I would think it's possible that time itself didn't really exist before the hypothesized Big Bang, in which case you could argue that it was in fact always there.
IANAP
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by khallow on Wednesday June 25 2014, @04:26PM
You can argue the Moon is made of green cheese. But that doesn't make it a fact.
(Score: 2) by tathra on Wednesday June 25 2014, @05:31AM
the energy may have existed, but the universe didn't. the "big bang" is when our universe came into existence, not the energy within it; where that came from is still an open question.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by edIII on Wednesday June 25 2014, @05:36AM
I'm not so sure about that.
I'm not an astrophysicist or quantum field theorist, so I can't speak from authority either. I do hear about it a lot, and one of things I've noticed is that there is a heck of a lot math involved. It's all tied to observations and whether or not they fit a model.
Part of what I've been sold on by people is that the Big Bang theory is supported by observations, and is not in the same ballpark as creationism. Creationism operates solely on circular reasoning because God can be neither proved or disproved. It begins with the assumption that God exists, he sent Jesus, and the Bible is 100% fact. It's also the rejection of any kind of observations and theories that can prove the "Bible Model" not being perfect.
If gravity was denied in the Bible, they would deny gravity just like Bugs Bunny, and that's looney tunes.
The Big Bang has, at minimum, some observations and actual data. That's already infinitely more than Creationism.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 25 2014, @12:33PM
Actually it was the other way round. Cosmologists for a long time assumed the universe was eternal. Einstein even introduced the cosmological constant as a fudge factor to allow an eternally stable universe. But then, the expansion of the universe was discovered, and just extrapolating into the past showed that everything had to been concentrated in a very tiny area at some time. Thus the big bang theory was born.
Also note that some quantum gravitation theory candidates predict that the big bang was actually a big bounce, at which an earlier universe collapsed, but not to a point but only to a very small minimal size, at which it bounced and expanded again.