Big Bang

There’s a curious thing about our universe. According to our best recent understanding of how it came to be, it shouldn’t still exist. Physicists who have been studying the Higgs particle or Higgs boson, which was discovered in 2012 and is the particle that gives mass to all particles, have come to the disquieting conclusion that the production of those particles during the rapid acceleration of the universe after the Big Bang, the inflation phase, should have caused our universe to get all wobbly and unstable and collapse. Of course, that can’t be right, right? We’re here, aren’t we. Uncollapsed. Scientists asked themselves that question, too, of course. A new theory holds that gravity might have provided the stabilizing influence needed. “The Standard Model of particle physics, which scientists use to explain elementary particles and their interactions, has so far not provided an answer to why the universe did not collapse following the Big Bang,” explains Professor Arttu Rajantie, from the Department of Physics at Imperial College London. “Our research