That's not quite clear yet, but it's certainly possible. That's why they do the experiments, rather than just making stuff up: to see how the world really works.
Sorry, that's wrong. The Big Bang doesn't impart mass to anything, and the Higgs doesn't have anything to do with the Big Bang. The Big Bang was proposed long before anyone had a clue about most of particle physics, and it isn't going to go away if the Standard Model has to be revised.
Quite possibly true, which would be wonderful, at least for particle physicists --it would give them something new to think about, and they really haven't had that much in the last twenty years. Successful theories are major triumphs, but they end up being quite boring. As it happens, theorists have been kicking around alternatives to a simple Higgs for decades. Perhaps they'll have to dust off some of their older theories, or come up with some new ones.
What about it? If the Higgs gives mass to particles, then God didn't create, but if mass comes from some other mechanism, then he did? You might want to work on your logic here. (You might also want to try posting in the correct forum: this is not a formal debate, and doesn't belong here.)
The last time I checked, a Higgs in the range of ~120 - 140 Gev/c[sup]2[/sup] had not been ruled out with high confidence; that was the case as of the announcement of LHC results in August. If you know of more recent result, speak up.
No, it's really not. Guth's original suggestion of inflation (not the Big Bang proper) suggested the Higgs as being the inflaton, the field whose transition drove inflation, but that has largely been ruled out by subsequent work. No doubt a detailed model of the early stages of the Big Bang will incorporate the Higgs, or whatever other mechanism confers mass, just as it will have to incorporate all of particle physics, but the Big Bang model does not depend on the existence of the Higgs.
Have to incorporate them into what? Please provide some references to papers in which some measurable aspect of the Big Bang is shown to be dependent on the existence of a single Higgs scalar.
The Higgs is one mechanism for generating particle masses; others are possible.
Sorry, but nothing in your reply addresses my request. Yes, if a dark matter version of the Big Bang is correct, and if the dark matter is composed of this particular candidate, and if the Higgs is the mechanism of spontaneous symmetry breaking in the SM, then we should be able to observe certain decays. How does that make the BB depend on the Higgs, which was your claim? How would replacing the Higgs with a different symmetry-breaking mechanism affect the Big Bang? (Note: it wasn't the technical aspects of the work I was objecting to -- I have a PhD in particle physics -- but its irrelevance to your claim.)
No, I'm trying to accurately state the results, which is why I said this mass range was not yet ruled out with high confidence -- something that you seem finally to have acknowledged. Look, when you're wrong, the correct response is something like, "Oops, I guess I was wrong", not blathering on for pages, raising spurious objections, linking to unrelated articles to obfuscate the situation, and of course insulting the guy who's corrected you. Regardless of how you respond, you will still have been wrong. It's up to you, though, whether you appear merely to have been wrong about one fact, or wrong, pig-headed and churlish. So far, you have chosen the latter route every time. I don't know what you think you're accomplishing by this approach, but I'm pretty sure it's not having the effect you're looking for.
Uh huh -- physics PhDs don't learn any math. Right. (And a refresher isn't needed, since alternatives to the Higgs were being widely considered and tested when I was in grad school, which was a long time ago.)
You seem to be confused about some basic ideas. The Higgs boson is the (or rather, one) proposed explanation for how particles acquire mass. Whether it is right or not, particles still have mass, dark matter is still dark and it is still matter with the same mass (assuming dark matter exists to begin with). Since the only thing that's known about dark matter is its mass, as long as the mass is unchanged the BB model is unaltered.
Some other mechanism, of course. It could be something as simple as multiple Higgs, or one of the whole series of technicolor models, or something much more exotic. You don't even need to know particle physics to know this: just read the bloody Wikipedia article on the Higgs.
Of course the SM is wrong; all particle physicists think that. That is, they think it's a good low-energy approximation to a more complete theory. They've been looking for decades for the evidence that will tell them how it's wrong, so they can begin to build a better theory. The idea that physicists are horrified by possible failure of the SM is simply ludicrous to anyone familiar with actual particle physics.
