Relativity Lite

Cosmology | 79 “And where are they going?” “Room 4, of course. We’ve relocated the people in Room 4 to Room 5. In fact, we’ve moved everybody up one room number.” Smith felt his head spinning. “But . . . but what about whoever’s in the last room?” “Ah, I see you’re labouring under a misconception. This is a Hilbert Hotel. There is no last room. We have infinitely many rooms—1, 2, 3, and so on forever. Right now, of course, they’re all full because we have infinitely many guests. But infinity plus one is still infinity, so we can rearrange the guests to create an extra room for you.” * Thus, the answer to our question is tied up with the question of just which universe we are living in and does not seem to be answerable apart from that. COSMIC INFLATION In 1964, Peter W. Higgs proposed a mechanism to account for the existence of massive particles arising from the massless ones so far predicted by our theories. † One might roughly think of this Higgs field permeating all space acting as a drag on the motions of particles, making them more ponderous, as we are when we are walking in a swimming pool. Carl Hagen, Gerald Guralnik, and Tom Kibble also published a paper a month later on this top- ic. ‡ Francois Englert and his colleague Robert Brout, who died in 2011, actually published their version two months before the publication of Higgs’s paper. § But Higgs was the only one of the six who explicitly suggested that a particle would be associated with this field, whose spin would be zero (a class of particles known as bosons), ¶ so his name was attached to that particle and via that to the field. The Higgs boson was confirmed on July 4, 2012, at the CERN particle accelerator. ** In 2013, Higgs and Englert were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their theories. (The rules of the Nobel stipulate that recipients be living persons, excluding Brout, and going to a maximum of three recipients, preventing the trio of Hagen, Guralnik, and Kib- ble from being added. In 2010, all six were awarded the J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics.) What would be the effect on the evolution of the Big Bang if there were a Higgs field permeating all space? In 1981, Alan Guth suggested that such a field would have a profound * Ian Stewart, New Scientist 160 , 58 (1998). † Peter W. Higgs, Phys. Lett. 12 , 132 (1964); Phys. Rev. Lett. 13 , 508 (1964). ‡ G. S. Guralnik, C. R. Hagen, and T. W. B. Kibble, Phys. Rev. Lett. 13 , 585 (1964). ​ https://home.cern/news/press-release/cern/new-results-indicate-particle-discovered-cern-higgs-boson.