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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: 5, Informative) by MrGuy on Wednesday June 25 2014, @12:14AM
Evolution by natural selection in no way posits or requires a big bang. Which is lucky for evolution, because the theory of evolution (1859) pre-dates the big bang theory (1949) by nearly a century.
What it does posit was that there was a time in the past when different forms of life existed than exist today, and over time species rose and fell in response to the conditions they found. The concept of evolution is not incompatible with the idea that at some point in the past, the earth (and potentially everything else in the universe) was created by an intelligent being, or sprung into being spontaneously due to a phenominally unlikely quantum mechanical event, or was created by a flying spaghetti monster. Evolution doesn't care about WHERE the earth came from. Just that it's old, and life evolved over time.
The only universe creation theory that evolution is INcompatible with is the belief that the earth is of (cosmologically) recent origin AND the various species on earth today (notably human beings) have existed in their current form (and ONLY in their current form) since the moment of that creation.
Don't conflate one theory that's incompatible with a strict reading of the Bible as a historical text (evolution by natural selection) with a completely different and independent theory that's also incompatible with a strict reading of the Bible as a historical text (the big bang as the origin of the universe).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 25 2014, @12:46PM
Actually big bang theory isn't incompatible with a truly strict reading of the bible as historical text: If you look closely at the beginning of Genesis, you'll find that all of the stuff described there happened after the creation of the earth, which is mentioned just in the first sentence, without giving any details: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Yes, that's all the bible says about it. It doesn't say how God created them (through a big bang, or by instantaneously popping it into existence, or however else), or even how long it took to make them.
(Score: 1) by cykros on Wednesday June 25 2014, @03:12PM
Well yea; the Big Bang Theory was in large part theorized by Belgian Catholic Priest Georges Lemaitre [wikipedia.org] with his 1931 work "Hypothese de l'Atome Primitif" (hypothesis of the primeval atom). It's hardly some primarily atheist theory to overthrow religion, regardless of what you learned in Sunday School.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday June 25 2014, @09:44PM
I've heard some god-botherers claim that Genesis I is actually an expression of both the big bang theory (on the first days) and of evolution (days 3, 5, and 6). Their sources predate yours by about a stone age.
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