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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: 2) by Theophrastus on Wednesday June 25 2014, @02:20AM
dark matter done it.
if your model don't fit,
dark matter done did it.
if your system is lame,
dark energy is to blame.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tathra on Wednesday June 25 2014, @02:46AM
you DO realize that "dark matter" and "dark energy" simply means that we know there's some kind of matter/energy due to its effects, but we can't see or measure directly, right? its not some mythical substance made up just to keep physicists in jobs, as your post implies.
and we can see their effects: gravitational lensing where there's no visible matter, far more than if it were simply a random, naked black hole (the orbit speed thing could just be caused by errors in GE or too much simplification in making the calculations easy enough to solve, or something like that); the expansion of space not just continuing, but actually accelerating without any energy input that we can find; we've seen and measured its effects to the best of our ability, whatever it is thats causing those effects, but we have no idea what 'it' actually is since we cant see or measure 'it', thus 'dark' matter/energy, rather than calling it something obtuse like "that energy/matter whose effects we can see and measure but cant actually measure or see directly".
(Score: 2) by Theophrastus on Wednesday June 25 2014, @03:02AM
yes i know. just a jest.
yet i'm not at all certain that "we know there's some kind of matter/energy..." for any deep sense of "know". there has to be something there -if- all current models are correct. that's all we "know": if this then that. the this can still be wrong. that's the great strength of science, placing limits on unlimited error.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Wednesday June 25 2014, @08:57AM
I Don't! Theophrastus is my new hero! He has enlightened me about the dark matter! All hail! All hail!