Scientists may have found a solution to one of the most profound questions in cosmology: What drove the Universe’s rapid expansion immediately after the Big Bang?
“According to what we call ‘standard’ cosmology, our universe is and has been expanding at different rates throughout its history,” explained Humberto Gilmer, a postdoctoral researcher at Brown University and one of the authors of the study, in an email to Advanced Science News.
“To understand this expansion, think of a muffin with some blueberries embedded in it; as the muffin bakes, these blueberries, which aren’t moving in the batter, still move relative to each other because the whole muffin is expanding. In a nutshell, that’s how our universe behaves. Inflation, then, is a period when that expansion happened extremely rapidly. But how do you get such a period? That’s an open question we sought to answer.”
Their new findings suggest that the Higgs boson, a particle discovered in 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider, might be the culprit and could have played a pivotal role in this process.
A short disclaimer before we read further: I’m a materialist. Materialism is a branch of philosophy to which the sciences, particularly the physical and life sciences, owe a lot. Materialism posits that the material world — matter — exists, and everything in the Universe, including consciousness, is made from or is a product of matter. An objective reality exists and we can understand it. Without materialism, physics, chemistry, and biology as we know it wouldn’t exist.
Another branch of philosophy, idealism, is in direct contradiction to materialism. Idealism states that, instead of matter, the mind and consciousness are fundamental to reality; that they are immaterial and therefore independent of the material world.
A lot of scientists and researchers don’t necessarily have a conscious philosophy, or else don’t consider philosophy to be particularly relevant to their day-to-day work. But by not having a conscious philosophy, scientists – like anyone else – can unconsciously pick up other philosophies and outlooks in the society around them. READ MORE...
