Avenio wrote:Barringtonia wrote:Where does Higgs Boson fit into all this?
The Higgs Boson is one of the subatomic particles that make up protons and neutrons, which give them the properties we associate with matter. (Magnetism, mass, spin etc.) The bosons are particles that, from what I can gather from whatever arcane language its Wikipedia article is written in, gives atoms their ability to become and remain stable. (ie stay in proton-electron-neutron form)
The model that physicists use to study these subatomic particles, however, predicts the existence of another type of particle, which gives the atom its mass, which is the Higgs Boson. The problem with finding these particles is that it requires a colossal amount of energy for them to break the atomic bonds and split into their subatomic particles, and these particles have a very short lifespan and are very difficult to find, meaning we cannot see them in nature. This was why projects like CERN were created, to try and prove the existence of the Higgs Boson and prove the Standard Model correct, or find that they do not, at which point the physicists need to go back to the old drawing board and come up with a new theory.
Ah, okay, so Higgs Boson is more a look at what makes up matter whereas what we're discussing is how that matter is, amm, moving, although I guess they're very much intertwined.
I sort of read all this stuff, from Just Six Numbers to various cosmological books but rarely sat with someone who could reduce the conversation to parts, I do love the Carl Sagan videos.
For those who want to watch the whole thing, starts here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30j70GT1 ... playnext=1
it kind of makes me question a couple of things, the Big Bang itself doesn't seem a conclusive explanation in some senses though I suspect I don't quite get it. It's the singular point I have issues with, especially if we're going along with the dark matter theory, which also seems... I don't know, an answer in place of an 'I don't know' - for infinite space, I assume infinite time and thus a Big Bang seems, well slightly unnecessary - could we be mistaking something that was simply a cataclysmic event in an existing universe?
Ah, I see scientists are way ahead of me..
While the Big Bang model is well established in cosmology, it is likely to be refined in the future. Little is known about the earliest moments of the Universe's history. The Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems require the existence of a singularity at the beginning of cosmic time. However, these theorems assume that general relativity is correct, but general relativity must break down before the Universe reaches the Planck temperature, and a correct treatment of quantum gravity may avoid the singularity.[58]
Some proposals, each of which entails untested hypotheses, are:
models including the Hartle–Hawking no-boundary condition in which the whole of space-time is finite; the Big Bang does represent the limit of time, but without the need for a singularity.[59]
brane cosmology models[60] in which inflation is due to the movement of branes in string theory; the pre-big bang model; the ekpyrotic model, in which the Big Bang is the result of a collision between branes; and the cyclic model, a variant of the ekpyrotic model in which collisions occur periodically.[61][62][63]
chaotic inflation, in which inflation events start here and there in a random quantum gravity foam, each leading to a bubble universe expanding from its own big bang.[64][65]
Proposals in the last two categories see the Big Bang as an event in a much larger and older Universe, or multiverse, and not the literal beginning.
