In 2012, I shared my excitement with you about the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN in my post Higgs Boson: Our Understanding of the Universe Is About to Change.
While the Higgs boson is now often described as the particle that “blew up” the universe, a recent article published by New Scientist raises a fascinating question: Believe it or not, this burst of cosmological inflation—followed by a slower, more gradual expansion—is the most plausible way to explain the current structure of the universe. But there’s still one mystery: what caused the inflation?
Jon Cartwright, the article’s author, suggests that the Higgs boson—the particle responsible for giving mass (or inertia) to other particles—might hold an explosive secret. As Juan García-Bellido from the Autonomous University of Madrid puts it, “If the Higgs gives inertia to particles, could it also give inertia to the entire universe?”
That’s a very intriguing question…
