![]() ![]() Inflation is the idea that in the earliest days of the Big Bang, our cosmos underwent a period of extremely enhanced expansion, doubling in size every billionth of a second. They invoked an idea called the multiverse, which is born out of a theory called inflation. Their solution: The universe was just born that way. In a paper published in January to the journal Physical Review Letters (opens in new tab), they outlined their solution to the twin conundrums. (Image credit: Maximilien Brice/CERN) (opens in new tab) A matter of multiversesĪ pair of theorists, Raffaele Tito D'Agnolo of the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) and Daniele Teresi of CERN, thought that these two problems might be related. The world's largest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, forms a 17-mile-long (27 kilometers) ring under the French-Swiss border. No known natural phenomena should enforce that symmetry, and yet nature seems to be obeying it. But the mathematics of the strong force do not show that same symmetry. In all experiments performed to date, the strong force appears to obey the combined symmetry (opens in new tab) of both charge reversal and parity reversal. For example, there is the symmetry of charge (change all the electric charges in an interaction and everything operates the same), the symmetry of time (run a reaction backward and it's the same), and the symmetry of parity (flip an interaction around to its mirror-image and it's the same). In the mathematics (opens in new tab) that physicists use to describe high-energy interactions, there are certain symmetries. In another, and initially unrelated problem, the strong force (opens in new tab) isn't exactly behaving as the Standard Model predicts it should. So once the champagne was opened and the Nobel prizes (opens in new tab) were handed out, the question loomed: Why does the Higgs have such a low mass? But back-of-the-envelope calculations made physicists guess that the Higgs would have an incredibly large mass. ![]() For that theory to work, the number has to be derived experimentally. To be perfectly clear, the framework physicists use to describe the zoo of subatomic particles, known as the Standard Model, doesn't actually predict the value of the Higgs mass. The Higgs had a mass of 125 gigaelectronvolts (GeV), which was orders of magnitude smaller than what physicists had thought it should be. ![]()
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