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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, 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.