New scientific calculations earlier this year predicted that the Higgs particle should have collapsed the entire universe moments after the big bang. It now seems that did not happen because of the influence of gravity.
The discovery of the Higgs in 2012 was a milestone in physics. This is the particle that….screw it, I’m not even going to say what the Higgs does again. I’ve talked about it so much lately, I don’t want to be accused of repeating myself. Anywho……the fact that we discovered the Higgs (or did we) doesn’t mean that there isn’t a lot more to learn about it. And learn about it we have. When scientists combined our latest understanding about this particle with other recent discovery about gravity waves and the inflationary universe (which is itself controversial), an astounding prediction leaped out of the new equations. The Higgs particle, when it was created during the exponential inflationary phase of the early universe, should have cause massive instability; enough to cause the entire universe, and our future existence, to collapse back into itself. That woulda been quite a bummer.
