Slashdot Mirror
Higgs Data Could Spell Trouble For Leading Big Bang Theory
ananyo writes "Paul Steinhardt, an astrophysicist at Princeton University in New Jersey, and colleagues have posted a controversial paper on ArXiv arguing, based on the latest Higgs data and the cosmic microwave background map from the Planck mission, that the leading theory explaining the first moments of the Big Bang ('inflation') is fatally flawed. In short, Steinhardt says that the models that best fit the Planck data — known as 'plateau models' because their potential-energy profiles level off at relatively low energies — are far less likely to occur naturally than the models that Planck ruled out. Secondly, he says, the news for these plateau models gets dramatically worse when the results are analyzed in conjunction with the latest results about the Higgs field coming from CERN's Large Hadron Collider. Particle physicists working at the LHC have calculated that the Higgs field is likely to have started out in a high-energy, 'metastable' state rather than in a stable, low-energy configuration. Steinhardt likens the odds of the Higgs field initially being perched in the precarious metastable state as to those of dropping out of the sky over the Matterhorn and conveniently landing in a 'dimple near the top,' rather than crashing down to the mountain's base."
That sounds like a cosmic catastrophe in the making. Or has it already happened?
Ezekiel 23:20
....we just don't know.
That "great space kablooey" theory was stupid as hell anyway. Amazing to me that people actually believed it. Come to think of it, as extremely insignificant as we all are, it's amazing to think that we would think we know anything at all about the universe....
It wasn't a Big Bang, but a Medium Bang!
gotta get out my papers, nobel prize for fizziks here I come!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Any theory of the origin of everything has to start with nothing. Absolutely nothing. Otherwise, you're not talking about an origin, you're talking about something that already existed, and that means that you now have to figure out the origin of that thing before you can find the origin of everything. Both the current Big Bang theory and God follow this same origin story, and neither one explains an origin for itself.
OK, so I'll confess my ignorance on this one, and maybe someone can clarify it.
Does this have anything to do with if the universe will go through a big crunch? Or is this more about the models about the mechanics of the big bang?
I have no idea what this summary is saying since it's outside of my field, so I have no idea if this is good news, bad news, or a different in understanding something which is pretty abstract anyway. :-P
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Hideki!
A: Other variations of the big bang theory are safe, just the 'main' version is in trouble
or....
B: The big bang theory itself is in trouble, including any of its variations. 'Leading' here would mean big bang theory over say, a steady state universe.
From what I can tell, the Slashdot title means B due to this quote in the story:
But if you take the data we’ve been given and just follow your nose, then inflation and the whole Big Bang paradigm seem to be in big trouble,” Steinhardt says.
Emphasis on "whole".
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It's more like intelligent design.
Completely based on the anthropic principle and in violation of the fundamental premise of quantum theory. In QT you can't make any other Bayes statistical conclusion other than 50/50 when you only have one data point. Since you can't resimulate the universe, cosmology as a science is currently bogus.
..but I have always been skeptical of "inflation"
It seemed like a mathematical "band-aid", applied in desperation to a flawed theory
The old ways are best:
This finding is relevant because it suggests the existence of a limited number of ephemeral particles per unit volume in a vacuum.
In other words, there is no nothingness; everything is something. Thus we're looking at vacuums being a variation of type of substrate of matter, not an absence of matter. Mind-blowing. Be sure to drop acid before reading this.
Please. Pretty Please...
Years ago, this was a significant debate, but in recent years the debate was "settled" - the universe's expansion is actually increasing in rate.
I have always felt that it was wrong to call this settled. The increased rate of expansion of the universe is explained by "Dark Energy", a completely unknown entity with unknown properties. There is no reason why the effects of Dark Energy might change (or even reverse) over time. So, is the universe expanding at an increasing rate? Apparently. Will it continue to do so? I don't think that is even close to answered.
Great warrior...hrmph! Wars not make one great.
A wizard did it.
... the most idiotic paper I have read all year. It's a silly collection of straw-man arguments, with no actual science in it at all.
What they claim is "universally accepted" (actually, they claim it is almost "universally accepted", quotes theirs), isn't. Which is why they have to use the silly quotation marks.
Plateau-like models are not the only ones consistent with Planck. See: the Planck paper on inflationary constraints
Inflation has always had a problem with initial conditions. Guess what? It's still there.
"A challenge for the inflationary paradigm in light of the Planck2013 data is to explain why no significant multiverse effects have been observed" Wuh? Maybe, um, because there might not be a multiverse at all?
It's not a cosmic catastrophe so much as a physics one, although I'd prefer to call it a physics "opportunity"! Having found the Higgs we already know that there is now an incredible precarious balance even within the Standard Model. The Higgs is a fundamental scalar particle which is a radically different beast from any other fundamental particle we know of. One of the strange properties of the Higgs is that there are corrections to its mass which scale with energy squared.
This might not sound like a big deal but quantum mechanics means that even at low energies these high energy corrections to the Higgs mass are important. The question then becomes "what energy is our current knowledge of physics good to". Well if we look at the Standard Model of particle physics it is missing gravity so, at the scale where gravity becomes important (about a million billion times higher in energy than the LHC) we know the SM breaks down.
The problem is that this means the Higgs mass is corrected by a series of terms each of which is ~32+ orders of magnitude larger than the mass itself. This means that you need a cancellation to better than one part in ~10^32 by chance. This is about the same chance as winning the UK national lottery every week for 4-5 weeks in a row or tossing a coin and having it come up heads over 100 times in a row. If either of these events actually happened nobody would believe they happened by chance - there would be investigations into how someone managed to cheat the lottery or you would want to inspect the coin to make sure it did not have two heads.
There are solutions to this conundrum: Supersymmetry makes all the corrections to the Higgs mass cancel precisely (above some energy scale) and Large Extra Dimensions lowers the scale where gravity becomes important considerably. What would be interesting to know is whether these solutions to the fine tuning problem we have in the Standard Model also solve the fine tuning which this paper suggests that cosmology also has.
Sensationalism posting again. Why can't you people who want to post science, especially physics, articles, wait until there's been time to *peer review* the controversial claims? Otherwise, you're giving credence to (don't know if it's junk science, that's the point) unproven statements.
I can put an article up in ArXiv that the universe is full of purple elephants. Slashdot article pops up the next day, "Ooh, big controversy, the universe could/might/almost/maybe is full of purple elephants. What will that mean?" Get my point?
Why is this called Steinhardt's paper? Anna Ijjas is first author and she's a post-doc at Harvard.
Sheldon will be not happy...
... the Higgs data will show the universe is only 6,000 years old!
Trolling is a art,
But wouldn't something like the quantum immortality effect come into play here? In other words, to steal the Matterhorn analogy, we are guaranteed to have fallen into the dimple at the top instead of falling down the sides because we live in this universe and all the other possible universes never formed because they did fall down the sides.
Granted, occams razor and all that, but it is at least interesting to think about.
Therefore the singularity that existed at the time of the Big Bang hadn't "come" from anywhere.
"Where exactly is it, in some infinite void?"
Where is the past, exactly? Another meaningless question. It isn't there any more since we are AFTER the singularity stopped being a singularity.
"Are there more like it"
There could be, but it depends on what you model the reality as.
" all oscillating between Exapansion and Collapse throughout eternity"
Not possible because of the second law of thermodynamics. You'd have to explain why it doesn't apply here.
Chicken that laid a very large egg.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Maybe it is a good indication that the inflation theory is bogus, and that we should look at alternatives such as the big bounce theory:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bounce
We have yet to see how the latest Planck results agree with that one.
We (I am an atheist) cannot prove the non-existance of God.
This is a dead horse that's been beaten to death so many times we've hardly got a carcass. Yes, actually, you can.
Let's take the Flying Spaghetti Monster. He's made of spaghetti and two meatballs. We know that these two components neither have sentience or the ability to fly. If you change their molecular configuration such that the material involved should become sentient and capable of flight, you no longer have spaghetti and meatballs. Put another way, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, is, in fact, the equivalent of a square circle. He's a logical contradiction that can't possibly be real. We can apply the same reasoning to Invisible Pink Unicorns. Something that's invisible can't also be pink, and visa versa.
The gods dreamed up by all our fanciful imaginations are equally contradictory. Take the Christian god. It's omniscient, omnipotent, yet has human form. It's described as one god, but is made up of three entities. Preordains everything, but simultaneously possesses free will. Perfect good, but created evil.
In other words, Christians worship a square circle.
I know you want to be kind to your intellectually inferior friends, but there are no contradictions in the universe. Sure, there are infinite possibilities, but gods aren't possibilities. They're pure fantasies, as the moment you eliminate properties that eliminate the contradictions, they cease to be gods.
Good. This means scientists had a theory, and they've been testing the hell out of it. As they find data that contradicts the theory, they will rework the theory to match what is observed. This is exactly what we want. We should be celebrating because the scientific process works.
Just like they "invented" the force of gravity to explain why the planets didn't just go flying off?
You forgot option C: Neilsen ratings for the CBS comedy are going down the tubes.
The universe starting out in an unlikely high-energy state? isn't that just what the Big Bang theory says anyway?
for a minute there I thought they were talking about the TV show...
The thing that bugs me about a Big Bang Theory is where did this singularity come from?
I am not a physicist. My limited understanding is that under M-Theory the universe may be a higher-dimensional membrane, a "brane". Furthermore, the universe is not unique, there are numerous branes, a multiverse. Its been suggested that when two branes collide a new one is formed ... a new brane, a new universe, a big bang.
So being of human form, it's impossible to attain omniscience or omnipotence? What's so limiting about human form that prevents such characteristics?
This is just silly. For omniscience, the brain would have to both contain as many atoms as there are in the universe in order to know everything, and multiplied for temporal states. That's a really big brain. For omnipotence, well, I'm wondering about skeletal loading and muscular strength. Then I guess this god has telekinetic powers, or something? Gee, see how quickly this starts to look like something out of a Dungeons and Dragons playbook?
To be fair, not every Christian denomination believes this, or at least in the way that you're implying.
You're suggesting some Christians then believe that Jesus isn't god? If not, then what was Jesus? Just a really good human by their standards?
Preordination is not a necessary characteristic of God; omniscience and preordination can be easily confused.
Sigh. Isaiah 46:10, Acts 2:23, Revelations 1:8.
No; created free-acting agents that of their own will chose evil.
See previous Bible verses. He created so-called free-acting agents while simultaneously knowing the outcome. Can't have it both ways. Pick one.
Could it be that the contradictions you see in God are of your own misunderstanding of others' beliefs?
The contradictions come from the Bible, which is the source of others' beliefs.
And this guy proved it. Real existence would be unbearable.
What you describe is a belief, an assumption, but not a religion. Even when some atheist DO make the statement they are 100% sure there is no gods, they still have no credo, no ceremony, no priest or priesthood, no leitmotiv, no church, no chants, no holy books, nothing BUT that belief in 100% surety non existence of gods. That does not make it a religon. Otherwise 9/11 truther , Alien landing believer, and other believer in woo stuff would be religion. They are not. It needs much much more than that to have a religion. Thus the assertion atheist are religious even pertaining to the 100% sure atheist , is false.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
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If the evolution of a stable universe requires the Higgs field to start out at a metastable point, and if variations in those initial conditions lead to universes which collapse rather than inflating, then "the amplitude" (i.e. the probability that they are the outcome that we turn up in) for those other states is zero. Why? Because those universes all collapse long before we could show up.
On the other hand, if Steinhardt is correct, then his result shows there is a path to here-and-now through the metastable point, and if that's what it takes to get here, then that's enough: that's what it takes. The amplitude of the entire wave function for the Steinhardt path is non-zero, unlike the functions for the ones that collapsed.
http://www.cosmologystatement.org/
This is the most complex argument I've heard that the universe is only 6000 years old.
Why do you religious people keep saying that atheism is a religion?
Because atheists have formed a conclusion, they have a belief, they merely have come to the opposite conclusion, the opposite belief.
One definition of religion is a group of people with a shared belief, in particular a belief that can not be proven. Given that a deity can be neither proven nor disproven, people who believe or disbelieve in a deity are both operating in a religious manner.
An agnostic is a person who has formed no conclusion, who does not know whether or not a deity exists because there is no evidence either way.
It would seem that the agnostic is the person operating on a non-religious manner.
I'm not going to sleep well tonight knowing my understanding of the Universe has changed from one form of utter nonsense to another.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Citing Scripture isn't helpful here because the majority of Christians worldwide do not believe in the principle of sola Scriptura.
You're saying it isn't helpful to cite what Christians call the word of God (i.e., the authoritative text on the nature of god and their religion)?
They look to a Tradition which draws upon the Bible, but only in combination with an extrabiblical rule of interpretation.
Let me reword that: Christians reserve the right to dispense with the perfect, unchanging word of God when it suits them. A god they claim is also perfect and unchanging, but one that is self-evidently imperfect in the first half of the Bible then changes into something slight more perfect in the latter half, and, well, whose nature is subject to interpretation and speculations and so forth.
This brings us back to my original point. This god is a square circle. But some interpret it to be a square triangle, too. Entirely flexible to interpretation, with opinions ranging so wildly in contradiction about what this god supposedly is--even by the most strict reading of the holy book that's used to define it. Every definition here is so loose and fungible so as to be utterly useless in practice.
Bottom line? When something is either real or factual, the specification of that thing becomes more narrow and more precise as scrutiny continues. When held up to honest inspection, a thing's definition becomes more rigid and more exacting. When it comes to gods and religions, we see the exact opposite. As time passes, the number of sects, interpretations, opinions, authorities, and dogmas only increases. Everything about religion becomes more and more vague as it's studied. That's how we know it's false. That's how we know people are chasing their imaginations and not something which actually exists.
With Christianity, the fact that this religion existed for several decades before the compilation of any texts makes it pretty clear that calling the Bible--and not the tradition that predates it--the ultimate source of Christian belief is inaccurate.
Meaning an entire system of beliefs and stories about the nature of the universe was based on word-of-mouth testimony by people who lived in an era when superstition ran rampant. I'll let Neil deGrasse Tyson answer to that.
http://youtu.be/NSJElZwEI8o?t=2m50s
Cheers.
I think at that point it is more about Linguistics, Philosophy, Neuroscience than actual physics.
Other than in Math which can get very conceptual, human thought likes to deal with discrete things. Stuff like Infinite, Everything, Nothing, or anything that is an absolute is very difficult to process. We like to label things, we like to describe things. In describing something you are by nature encapsulating it into a known value. In many cases we describe things in absolute terms, even those things rarely are. Anytime you do this you are describing a barrier, and when we think of barriers, one of the defining elements is that there are two sides, one is separated from the other. You can't have a barrier with something on one side, and nothing on the other, there is always something on the other side. Hence if everything is contained within the big bang, where does the big bang reside, ad nauseam. My favorite example is that of a simple apple. We define an apple by its apparent observable boundary, of its skin. When in in reality, it is comprised of particles that are constantly in a state of flux vibrating and moving. At best we might be able to describe it in an equation that describes the movements of the particles in relation to each other within the apple, and visually we simply apply a threshold of what we can observe to define it more easily. However if you delve smaller and smaller, you have more to describe, much as I expect as with the Higgs. Who is to say what is beyond that to further describe to have a better understanding of the physics involved. We are limited by what we can observe. When it comes down to it, everything is everything, but that is hardly really useful information.
On top of all that there is the question of why we are limited in this way to labeling and describing things, that do not translate very well to these kinds of debates. Why can we not think in such a matter to understand these principles better. There is the debate which is a bit of a chicken or the egg argument, does how we think define our language, or does our manner of communication and language define how we think. One might argue that our ability to reason (or even basic communication of anything) is an evolutionary trait designed to pass information from one to another for the purposes of survival (and by extension procreation). This seems to be mostly the facilitation of the brain processing abstract ideas to discrete descriptions and vice versa. However as mentioned earlier there is some difficulty with that likely mostly dependent on what we can physically observe. Perhaps an apt example (maybe) might be the translation between digital and analog. It is not always exact, and is done using accepted thresholds of meaning.
Anyway one of the larger problems as I see it, is that we have disciplines like physics that generally speaking use observation and highly conceptual mathematics to try and describe the universe around us. However the further we get away from what we can physically observe, we are left with trying to use reason to explain what we cannot observe, and when trying to do so translating conceptual ideas of infinite, etc... generated by mathematics into rational arguments it is impossible to do so.
So until we are able to breach this linguistic/Neuroscience barrier of how we communicate/think, I think we will have a very hard time describing the universe past a certain point both at a macro and a micro level using physics (other than to say that math is telling us stuff we don't understand and we build physical constructs to try to explain it away).
At this point I probably need some weed or a lobotomy or something.
We have no way of assigning probability to initial conditions of the universe because we don't anything about the space of possible universes. We can't even say that probability was involved. We already know that the universe began in a low entropy state, so a naive estimate of the probability of our universe is vanishingly small. So there must be some reason for the universe to start in a low entropy state, and until we understand that reason, we can't make any sense of initial probabilities.
The Tardis exploded!
Perhaps instead if the energy/mass concentration of massive black holes reaches a critical point an event similar to a big bang can occur.
For one this would readily explain the lumpy nature of the cosmic background radiation and the tendency for energy while cooling into matter to clump in the first place. Caused by the tremendous gravities effecting areas of space from individual non explosive black holes. Perhaps regional black holes create the clumping by effecting the propagation of energy cooling after an expansion event from a black hole explosion.
The first method perhaps to test for this possibility is to look for differentiation in the background radiation within a single region of space where a suspected black hole explosion might of taken place.
Perhaps assuming that all matter originated from a single explosive event was indeed flawed.
Thus the "Little Pop" theory has some merit after all. It came to me in about 1976, Initials ECR from Embro Ontario Canada at the time. With the help of a professor of logic who taught at the University of Western Ontario and who helped me learn to fly fish.
So yes I am a layman but the vision of a universe which has many origins has given me this vision.
How many elephants in the room can fit through the eye of the needle?
Jesus fucking christ, calm the fuck down already, or explain precisely what "dangerous" means.
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A theory can be invalidated by fact and field observation? This is the end of science as we believe it.... Wait, wait, wait... But this IS real SCIENCE...
If that is all your god does, then why are you worshipping him? Indeed what difference has he other than you've given it a name? Call it tapioca rather than god. Makes no difference.
If your god is just the "thing that set it all off", then there's nothing to worship, and no need of worship. Indeed, such a god gives no reason for an afterlife, soul or anything else that religions give to humans. Life is not given meaning by such a god, nor purpose.
So whenever a godbotherer goes all the way back to this level of god to finally eke out an honest and accurate "that could be true", you screw it all up because though you've finally said that this is the "god" you were talking about, you are definitely lying about that.
It isn't the god you were talking about.
It's the only one that could possibly be true, and the one you DO believe in has been shown untenable.
So rather than admit error, you lie.