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.
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
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".
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
From what I've heard, the big crunch was thrown out a few years ago (when they discovered that the universe is expanding at an ever increasing rate).
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.
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.
Why do you religious people keep saying that atheism is a religion?
Because some atheists act in a religious manner.
We (I am an atheist) cannot prove the non-existance of God. We can use our observations of the world around us and logic to come to a refusal to believe the fairy tales we're taught as children, and this is all in the realm of reason. But those of us who claim to know without doubt that there is no deity have crossed into the realm of faith.
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.
Well said... But Carl Sagan said it best: An atheist has to know a lot more than I do. Sagan certainly didn't believe in a god, but he just treated nonexistence as the default, and was willing to listen if someone actually came up with real non-faith-based evidence that nonexistence was wrong.
Why is this called Steinhardt's paper? Anna Ijjas is first author and she's a post-doc at Harvard.
Well, yes and no. You can't resimulate the universe, but you can make inferences from observations. Everything's moving apart, what does that mean? Possibly everything expanded from the same point. What would conditions be like if that were the case? The Big Bang is a model that attempts to explain observed phenomena - and we can do experiments to test how some of our theories about nature hold up to conditions suggested by that model.
If cosmological observations don't match quantum theory, then either QT or the observations are flawed. The solution to this dilemma isn't "don't try to come up with theories and test them." There may be cosmologists who take fundamentalist approach to their pet theories, but the science as a whole is not bogus.
my, your, his/her/its, our, your, their
I'm, you're, he's/she's/it's, we're, you're, they're
Maybe you should become a physicist, then.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Just like they "invented" the force of gravity to explain why the planets didn't just go flying off?
If by "they" you mean "Isaac Newton", then yes. There were certainly ideas better than "celestial spheres" before the Enlightenment, but not a useful theory that gave quantitatively correct results.
It's easy to propose the idea that "hey, what if the universe expanded really fast early on", but to invent a specific mechanism for that that describes why that happened, and why it stopped, and gives quantitatively correct results for the CMBR data is a lot of work. There have been many such hypotheses - some survived the recent, accurate CMBR data, but those make specific predictions about the Higgs field and will be further culled by the data coming from the LHC.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Um, that's exactly what an atheist is. They don't accept the god hypothesis without proof.
Every atheist thread seems to degenerates into semantic hair-splitting over the terms atheist and agnostic and what varying degree of confidence/belief/doubt they are suppose to represent. In my experience, this does not yield productive/interesting discussions.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
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.
This is the most complex argument I've heard that the universe is only 6000 years old.
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 ...
You don't have kids yet do you? When you do, you will learn that spaghetti and meatballs can indeed fly. :-)
Surely you jest. The Bible is disproven repeatedly. It is massively internally self-contradictory (and hence literally cannot possibly be true in its entirety). The book of Genesis is disproven -- not just not proven to be true, but proven to be false, proven to contradict a great deal of empirically founded, macroscopically and microscopically consistent knowledge, things that we accept as almost certainly true, beyond any sane question, every day.
It is difficult to even know where to begin in listing the problems in Genesis, as it isn't even approximately or metaphorically correct in its description of creation -- it has things in the wrong order, an absurd order temporally, it has nothing whatsoever that describes the actual processes any rational person would infer looking at the actual data. It gets the age enormously wrong. It gets the size wrong. It gets the structure wrong. It posits the story of a truly absurd flood (6 inches of rain a minute for 40 days straight to barely cover Mount Everest) and a Wal-Mart sized wooden boat ventilated through a carefully described one-square-cubit window in which every species on Earth that would be killed by such a flood -- which would be damn near every species on Earth -- was preserved. It describes a creation process for humans that never happened and is directly contradicted by the fossil record, introduced as an equally absurd explanation of theodicy -- the contradiction between believing in a compassionate and loving God and the existence of evil. It asserts that the Earth is the center of all things, floats on the ocean, and is surmounted by a solid bowl of sky hung with lights and pierced with holes through which God pours rain. It asserts that the stars can be shaken down by things like Earthquakes.
The "history" of the Bible is equally absurd and is contradicted repeatedly by archeology. Again it is difficult to know where to begin, but Tubal Cain as an "artificer of iron" is an excellent example, given that any Biblical timeline would put Tubal Cain several thousand years before the iron age. Iron, in other words, literally hadn't been invented yet. There isn't a shred of evidence outside of the assertions of the Bible itself that Moses ever existed (any more than there is evidence for Adam and Eve, or Noah, or any of the other figures from Genesis or Exodus). Jesus clearly was not omniscient or clued in on this, as he asserted on more than one occasion that Noah and the flood was a real person and real event (generally when predicting a similar apocalyptic event that never happened).
Besides, even if the Bible (old testament) were a nearly perfect history, instead of an obvious collection of fables, myths, legends, a mish-mosh of earlier Sumerian legends that dates no earlier than the first thousand years or so BCE that would not constitute any sort of evidence for the truth of its creation myths, any more than the creation myths of the Hindu religion are "proven" when somebody discovers that e.g. Mathura from the Mahabharata actually existed at some point in the past. I can write entire fantasies about (say) the Civil War with all sorts of characters that never existed and events that never happened and yet salt the story with references to things that did happen and people that did exist. I can even insert space aliens, or (in the case of the Iliad) with Gods. Does the Greek pantheon of Gods actually exist because they are characters in the Iliad and we've now discovered the site of ancient Troy? Does this prove Greco-Roman paganism, creation myth and all?
Look. I mean that quite literally. Forget the big bang and just look. You can, if you look for it, find and follow the entire historical argument and evidence for estimates of the size and age of the Universe. It isn't hidden, and isn't mysterious. Nor is it the product of "scientists with an agenda" unless that agenda is doing their best to figure out what really happened by letting the world speak for itself rather than taking an antique mythology written
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
It is fair to note that we have never observed an act of creation, in the literal sense. Indeed, the correct statement of the relevant, empirically supported physics is:
Mass-energy is neither created nor destroyed, but simply changes form.
More sophisticated field-theoretic statements conserve "information" as fundamentally as mass-energy, but the point is that these are conservation laws, things we have never observed to fail in an enormous range of observations and experiments and spacetime scales ranging from cosmology to the smallest scales we can currently measure.
The really, really interesting question is why anyone would have a "creation" theory for anything, given that we have yet to make a single concrete observation of a creation event of any sort, anywhere, at any time, or even find a way of inferring that such an event once upon a time might of occurred. All we have ever observed is things that already existed changing form. The Universe we can observe is a dance of existing stuff back as far as we can see in time, away as far as we can see in space, at all scales from the largest to the smallest that we can measure.
There is an interesting information theoretic argument that essentially proves that for an omniscient God to not be inconsistent, it has to be the Universe. In order to be omniscient and self-knowledgeable, the irreducible information content of God has to precisely match the irreducible information content of the Universe, defining the Universe as everything that exists (which must include God, if God exists). All of our observations of "sentience" or a sense of passing time involve entropy, and our understanding of reasoning and sentience as a dynamical state that changes over time further suggests that it is almost certainly meaningless to assign a property such as "sentience" to a Universe per se, no matter how complex, and the assertion of entropy as a measure of state change over time contradicts zero-entropy perfect knowledge. So there isn't any really great reason to conclude that the Universe is any sort of sentient God, but that's pretty much the only model (besides God as the really big and powerful but entirely mortal and time-bound space alien with technology that looks like magic) that isn't egregiously inconsistent.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
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.