The universe is permeated by a field known as the Higgs field, which gives everything its mass.
But the Higgs field isn’t entirely stable, and if it were to “bubble,” it would change reality to such a degree that everything in that “bubble” would cease to exist.
A team of scientists has now argued that the existence of primordial black holes should have triggered the “bubbling” of the Higgs field to such a degree that nothing should have ever been able to form.
The earliest days of the universe are shrouded in mystery. After all, it’s not like we can just pop back in time and check it out for ourselves. Instead, we’re restricted to piecing together our cosmos’s earliest history from hints, echoes, and faded waves propagating out into the infinite.
As a result, the models we create of these earliest times are often called into question by new math or physical observations that challenge the pieces we’ve put in place so far. And recently, a team of physicists did just that. According to their new study—now accepted for publication in the journal Physical Letters B—if many of our current models are correct, we wouldn’t exist at all. Nothing would. As things stand now, the whole universe should have annihilated itself.
But, obviously, the universe has not annihilated itself. After all, we’re here to ask all these probing questions. So, what gives?
It all comes down to two objects: primordial black holes and the Higgs boson particle.
The 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson is widely considered one of the great triumphs of modern physics. This is largely because it confirmed the existence of the Higgs field—a field much like electricity or magnetism that literally gives objects their mass. It’s complicated quantum mechanics, but it all boils down to this: if there’s no Higgs field, nothing exists at all.
All this to say that the Higgs field is incredibly important, and it’s incredibly important as it is. Because here’s a fun fact that isn’t existentially terrifying at all—theoretically, the Higgs field could change.
“The Higgs field isn’t likely to be in the lowest possible energy state it could be in,” Lucien Heurtier, one of the researchers on the new study, said in an article for The Conversation. “That means it could theoretically change its state, dropping to a lower energy state in a certain location. If that happened, however, it would alter the laws of physics dramatically.”
Basically, Heurtier explained that if the Higgs field were to drop to a lower energy state, it would cause the formation of little “bubbles” of space that were subject to entirely different rules of physics than the universe as we know it.
“In such a bubble,” he wrote, “the mass of electrons would suddenly change, and so would its interactions with other particles. Protons and neutrons—which make up the atomic nucleus and are made of quarks—would suddenly dislocate. Essentially, anybody experiencing such a change would likely no longer be able to report it.”
Luckily, that’s not going to happen any time soon—no need to panic. But the idea introduces a problem. In many of our existing models of the early universe, that actually should have happened already.
And that’s because of object two: the primordial black hole. Primordial black holes are hypothetical objects much like the black holes we see today, but orders of magnitude smaller in mass—they could be as small as a gram. According to many current models, they formed in the second right after the Big Bang, during an era known as inflation. Regions of the universe were so dense at that time that they would have been able to collapse in on themselves and form these teeny tiny black holes without the aid of a supernova. Just… shwoomp! Right into a black hole.
Now, these things—if they ever existed—were short-lived. They would have burned hot and evaporated away pretty dang quickly. But according to Heurtier and his team, they would have been around long enough to have an incredibly powerful impact on the Higgs field.
Those bubbles that we mentioned earlier? The universe-shattering ones? Yeah, primordial black holes should have caused them to appear all over the place.
The research team asserts that if primordial black holes existed during this early period of inflation as many current models suggest, the field would have been bubbling away like a shaken can of soda. So much so, in fact, that nothing should have ever been able to form in the first place.
But we exist, as does everything around us. So, where does that leave us?
Heurtier and his team propose two responses to this news. The first is that our models are wrong, and that we should discard the idea of primordial black holes altogether. After all, we know for sure that the Higgs field exists, so if there’s a problem, it must lie in the primordial black holes.
Right? Well, not definitely. The other scenario posed by the group is that we are missing serious physics—namely, that there is something big that we don’t understand about the way the Higgs field works. That’s often an option in particularly high-level physics—maybe there’s just some law or behavior or force or particle we don’t know about yet that will crack the whole thing wide open.
Certainly, this will not be the last team to investigate the theoretical interactions between the Higgs field and primordial black holes. Maybe this new understanding will stand, and maybe it won’t. But that’s the best part of science—you can, and should, question everything. Who knows what mysteries you’ll unlock?
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