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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 25 2014, @12:24PM
So the universe would have been kicked into the deeper valley? Well, kicking is a random process, right? So there's a, however slim, chance for the universe to end up in the higher valley, right?
Then there are at least two simple solutions to this problem:
Solution 1: There was not just one big bang, but myriads of them. With enough tries, even the most improbable event will happen. So we live in the lucky universe (or one of the lucky universes) that survived.
Solution 2: Almost the same, but without the need of more than one big bang: If many worlds is true, then there should have been, with certainty, one branch of reality which ended up in the higher valley. Since the lower valley branches collapsed away, the higher valley branch survived.
Of course, there's always also the most probable
Solution 3: We don't yet know everything about the universe, and if we had the final theory of everything, we'd find that we indeed live in the deepest valley, or maybe even that there is only one valley and the universe had no choice anyway. Assuming in that ultimate theory it actually still makes sense to speak of such valleys to begin with.