On Hawking's Birthday Marshall Barnes Revels In Higgs Boson's New Importance

YELLOW SPRINGS, Ohio - Jan. 8, 2015 - PRLog -- On the day before Stephen Hawking's birthday, scientists announce an important addition to the saga of the Higgs Boson particle, the same particle that Hawking announced would not be found in September of 2008. This puts further significance on Marshall Barnes' statement that he saw flaws in Hawking's position and that's what prompted him to take a public stance against it that same month, thus winning against Hawking four year later, July 4th of 2012.

According to physicists from Imperial College London, and the Universities of Copenhagen and Helsinki, gravity played an important role with the Higgs at the the beginning of the universe, that of preventing the universe from collapsing as a result of the Higgs, which gives all particles mass. In a new study in the journal Physical Review Letters, the team describes how gravity provided stability needed for the early universe to survive expansion. They investigated the interaction between the Higgs particles and gravity, taking into account how they would vary with energy. This gives validity to statements that Marshall Barnes made in 2012.

"It was just a matter of fact that the odds are, if Hawking is going out on a limb to say something, there's a good chance he's wrong. My willingness to see his $100 bet and raise it to $1,000, was a sign of my confidence. The LHC results simply prove my instincts were right - again. It's just fun that it's a part of the back story of a historic moment in physics."

"First of all, the reason that I took a public position against Hawking's bet is because I had been studying his work and knew that he has a psychological issue with wanting to be right, or appearing to be right, when he hasn't really thought through the problem to begin with. I am not a particle physicist but I am a damn good conceptual theorist and so I applied my skills of conceptual theory to the issue of the Higgs Boson. What I saw was overwhelming evidence that the Higgs should be real, that there wasn't really anything hindering the possibility of its existence (see http://www.prlog.org/11914207-higgs-boson-announcement-sh... (../11914207-higgs-boson-announcement-shines-light-on-step...) ). That's what led me to recognize that once again, Hawking was acting on impulse and the psychological thrill of the idea of taking a long shot and coming up right. There's only one problem with that - when he does it he's usually wrong, just like he's usually wrong when he makes his smart aleck pronouncements."

Marshall doesn't put much stock in the position of a number of physicists from Denmark who recently published a paper claiming that the particle that was discovered at CERN was not the Higgs Boson but a group of higgs-like particles that could account for the same effects.

"Where were these guys in the very beginning, to establish what the parameters should be for Higgs discovery? Nowhere. I waited for the team at CERN to make their announcement and then waited for Hawking to concede, which he did, before I claimed victory. Since then, more and more evidence has come in that it is the Higgs. This latest development concerning how the Higgs Boson would have collapsed the universe in the beginning if it hadn't been for gravity is just another indicator that what was discovered was the Higgs. Besides, Hawking hasn't even agreed with these naysayers and even if they were correct, it would only mean that the search for the real Higgs would continue, not prove that it doesn't exist".

Higgs Boson that was discovered had a mass of 125 billion electron-volts, or more than 130 times the mass of the proton creating the mystery as to how it was kept from collapsing the universe moments after the Big Bang. The work of the team led by physicist Arttu Rajantie at the Imperial College London has discovered that the likely solution to that question is gravity.

In an article for Space.com (see http://www.space.com/28181-gravity-higgs-boson-universe-d...), writer Charles Q. Choi states, "Now that Rajantie and his colleagues have revealed that the interaction between gravity and the Higgs played a major role in the early universe, they want to learn more
about the strength of this interaction. This could include looking at how the early universe developed using data from current and future European Space Agency missions that aim to measure the cosmic microwave background radiation, which constitute the echoes left over from the Big Bang, Rajantie said. It could also include studying gravitational waves, which are invisible ripples in the fabric of space-time given off by accelerating masses, he said."

All of this is happening as Marshall prepares to finally release the first critcal look at Hawking's work and significance in the world of physics. His book, Space Warps and Time Tunnels: The Infamous Legacy of One Stephen W. Hawking will reveal for the first time a comprehensive look at Hawking's pronouncements, theories and actual stature in the world of science, as well as his public image as a pop icon. It includes a look at all of the errors and mistakes that Hawking has made in his career as well as how Marshall became the person who discovered more of them than anyone else in the world. That, and the addition of new discoveries that Marshall has made concerning the nature of time and the information paradox, while researching the book, puts him squarely in the position to be seen as the man who's smarter than Stephen Hawking and has proved it.

The book will be published through Blurb.com which currently has Marshall's first book, Paradox Lost:The True Geomoetries of Time Travel (The Public Edition) (http://www.blurb.com/b/5622324-paradox-lost-the-public-edition ) which has a number of Hawking's time travel related mistakes in it along with others by Kip Thorne, Paul Davies, and Tim Maudlin.