That's okay. Souljah's been insulting me for some time. One more isn't going to break the bank.
It's a very interesting quote. So? Do you even know what the Higgs is? It's why
mass exists. It's a very nifty concept.
According to the Standard Model, the Higgs field is primordial reality. And, in the beginning, it was empty. Nothing there. Nada. Zilch. An empty Higgs field. Actually, an infinite number of them packed into Planck spaces.
But, since they were empty, there wasn't anything there. A room with no light is dark, is it not? 0 apples are no apples, correct?
A zero-point Higgs is nothing. It is, in fact, the barest, utter, most base definition of nothing possible. A zero point Higgs is the most perfect void imaginable. Not only lacking energy or matter, but lacking space or time as well.
Nothing, however, is an unstable state. And the Higgs, being a quantum field, will no stay "nothing". It would fluctuate, always keeping a net energy of zero.
However, above a certain critical value, something interesting happens. Symmetry breaks. The Higgs uncouples from gravity. The universe begins with this.
Your own link, by the way, has this to say:
The Higgs field is a particularly simple one - it has the same properties viewed from every direction, and in important respects is indistinguishable from empty space. Thus physicists conceive of the Higgs field being "switched on", pervading all of space and endowing it with "grain" like that of a plank of wood. The direction of the grain in undetectable, and only becomes important once the Higgs' interactions with other particles are taken into account. for instance, particles called vector bosons can travel with the grain, in which case they move easily for large distances and may be observed as photons - that is, particles of light that we can see or record using a camera; or against, in which case their effective range is much shorter, and we call them W or Z particles. These play a central role in the physics of nuclear reactions, such as those occurring in the core of the sun. The Higgs field enables us to view these apparently unrelated phenomenon as two sides of the same coin; both may be described in terms of the properties of the same vector bosons. When particles of matter such as electrons or quarks (elementary constituents of protons and neutrons, which in turn constitute the atomic nucleus) travel through the grain, they are constantly flipped "head-over-heels". this forces them to move more slowly than their natural speed, that of light, by making them heavy. We believe the Higgs field responsible for endowing virtually all the matter we know about with mass. Like most analogies, the wood-grain one is persuasive but flawed: we should think of the grain as not defining a direction in everyday three-dimensional space, but rather in some abstract internal space populated by various kinds of vector boson, electron and quark. The Higgs' ability to fill space with its mysterious presence makes it a vital component in more ambitious theories of how the Universe burst into existence out of some initial quantum fluctuation, and why the Universe prefers to be filled with matter rather than anti-matter; that is, why there is something rather than nothing
I can only conclude that either you do not read this links, quoting only the bits you feel relevent, or you have absolutely no interest in understanding these concepts.
Yin: Pre-Big Bang cosmologies are speculative at best. Quite a few bits of important data remain to be found, and some new concepts need to be worked out (quantum gravity).
However, I am not claiming the universe
did come about this way, or even that it's
likely. Only that, as we understand things now,
it could have. Souljah wanted to say it was "God or nothing". I pointed out that science has several ideas about it, none of which involve God.
Souljah's search for "nothing" is fatally flawed because what he's seeking does not, and never has, existed. "Nature abhors a vacuum" is a far truer statement than anyone realized. Souljah's locked into a macroscopic world, with macroscopic instincts and understandings. And they're failing him utterly on the quantum level. *shrug*. He's in good company. A lot of physicsts, in the early days of quantum mechanics, had similiar problems. Einstein was particularly put out. But quantum mechanics has been wildly successful in the last 80 years, and no physicist these days really argues with it. After all, anything that replaces it has to account for it, just as relativity enfolded Newton.
