Did a Higgs Boson trigger the big bang?

Magnus Warhol

Michio Kaku (see link) says that the Higgs Boson is the reason for the Big Bang. Is that true? I am not initiated enough in cosmology to know if I believe that a Higgs Boson triggered the Big Bang. Thanks



http://www.cnn.com/video/?hpt=hp_t2#...iggs-boson.cnn

phinds

I wouldn't trust anything Kaku has said in the last 10 years. He used to be a serious physicists (and QUITE a good one) but lately as become a popularizer of the worst sort. The fact that he said it doesn't MAKE it wrong, but it sure makes it highly suspect.

lpetrich

I watched it myself, and it seems very mixed up.

We don't know what began our Universe. It was likely in some state with strong quantum gravity, and quantum gravity is just plain hard.

However, there was likely a particle much like the Higgs particle involved in the very early Universe: the inflaton (no i). It's called that because it makes the inflationary phase of the history of the Universe, a period of exponential expansion that flattened it out and that froze into place quantum fluctuations as they got stretched beyond the event-horizon size.

However, the mass scale of the inflaton is something around 10¹⁵ GeV, which is much bigger than the Higgs particle's mass scale.

Mark M

It doesn't make sense to say something 'triggered' the big bang. The big bang was the hot and dense state the universe was in, and it's evolution from that state.

The Higgs Mechanism doesn't have anything to do with that. It's function is to break the electroweak symmetry.

As phinds said, I wouldn't trust too many of Kaku's popular science videos.

Nabeshin

If you listen carefully, he's saying that it was a 'higgs-like particle', not the higgs itself. I can only speculate, but I think he's actually referring to the inflaton here, since it, like the Higgs, is a scalar particle. Most of the other stuff he says in that video is nigh incomprehensible to me though...

bapowell

Yes, and note that the SM Higgs is recently in vogue again as an inflaton candidate as long as you mutilate the theory by introducing large scalar couplings, whacky kinetic terms, and the like.

Naty1

In a very recent paper here provided by Chronos:

Emergent Gravity

Emergent perspective of Gravity and Dark Energy
T. Padmanabhan
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthr...53#post3984153

The author states:

It would be rather amazing if the author missed such a definitive reason for the big bang!!