All About the Higgs

When we first met the Higgs field, we didn’t say much about it, but it’s very important and there’s a lot we need to know about it. So let’s talk Higgs.

No, Guys, That's Not How Inflation Went

Sean Carroll is blogging about his new arXiv paper, in which he and Grant Remmen analyze a couple of inflation models to see how likely it is that they produce enough inflation to explain why the universe is so flat and smooth. It’s interesting work, but not very useful because, as I told you here, inflation didn’t happen according to those models or any of the other inflation models the physicists have proposed. As usual, it comes down to whether your spacetime model is correct, and theirs ain’t.

Quantum Superpositions: Super Stuff

In an early post on this blog, entitled “What Are We Missing?”, I explained that the two things keeping the physicists from making progress are their fear of metaphysics and their lack of a correct spacetime model. I then showed that metaphysics is really physics and nothing to be afraid of, and I’m now doing a series of posts about the spacetime model that they need.

In my last post, we discovered that our spacetime of discrete points easily reproduces the physics of the early universe and is full of electrons, positrons, neutrinos, antineutrinos, and photons. This time I want to cover what I believe to be one of the truly wonderful features of this spacetime. It comes directly from the quantum mechanical principle of superposition and it gives us the composite particles such as protons and neutrons and the heavier leptons.