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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 Dunbal on Wednesday June 25 2014, @09:23AM
"we might actually know of whats really going on."
Nope. There will always be a spot on the map marked "Here Be Dragones". It's simply a matter of scale and diminishing returns. The more our theories deviate from the scale we are accustomed to working with in our day to day lives either up or down, the more abstract our methods of measuring and data collection must become. Not to mention the fact that manipulation of cause and effect is the only way we can logically confirm or discard our theories. We can't manipulate galaxies or subatomic particles, although we try to infer knowledge through observation of what we hope are similar events under what we believe are different specific conditions and we try to say this is equivalent to manipulation. The problem is that if there's something we're missing or we're not fully certain of all the variables in the different conditions, then we will get unexpected results and built in errors that are not accounted for. THEN add the fact that our physical laws might only apply as we know them in our immediate local part of the universe and might be slightly or vastly different elsewhere in places we'll never be able to go.
Yet once in a while the boundary can be pushed back a little further as we asymptotically approach where the Dragons live.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 25 2014, @12:59PM
But what me might hope for is that at least we can replace our atlas of maps which contradict each other by a single map that covers all the known territory without contradiction.
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Wednesday June 25 2014, @04:02PM
Hope if you want, but I think you'll always be looking for a bigger map.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday June 25 2014, @09:08PM
Maybe you should read again the post you replied to. Hint: It didn't say anything about the size or the completeness of the map. And also note the difference between "all territory" and "all the known territory".
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.