The Higgs Boson Reveals that the Universe Should Have Collapsed Seconds After the Big Bang

We shouldn't exist. At least, we shouldn't exist according to British cosmologists. They've predicted that the universe shouldn't have lasted more than a second after using data from the latest observations of the sky combined with the recent discovery of the Higgs boson.

The Big Bang created the universe and after it began, it went through a short period of rapid expansion known as "cosmic inflation." Although the details of this particular process aren't fully understood, cosmologists have attempted to predict how this would affect the Universe that we see today.

In fact, researchers from the BICEP2 collaboration actually detected one of these predicted effects. More specifically, they examined what the BICEP2 observations mean for the stability of the universe. They combined the results of recent advances in particle physics, including the detection of the Higgs boson by the Large Hadron Collider.

Measurements of the Higgs boson have allowed scientists to show that our universe essentially sits in a valley of the "Higgs field," which describes the way that other particles have mass. Yet there's a different valley which is much deeper; our universe is prevented from falling into it by a large energy barrier. What's interesting, though, is that BICEP2 results predict that the universe would have received "kicks" during the cosmic inflation phase and would have been pushed into this valley. This, in turn would have caused the universe to collapse.

"This is an unacceptable prediction of the theory because if this had happened we wouldn't be around to discuss it," said Robert Hogan, one of the researchers, in a news release. "If BICEP2 is shown to be correct, it tells us there has to be interesting new particle physics beyond the standard model."

Obviously the universe didn't collapse, so the new findings, if correct, pave the way to future research. It's possible that physicists could have opened the door to a whole new set of data.

The findings were presented at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting on June 24 in Portsmouth.