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So the Higgs boson is fine-tuned?

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Well, that’s what it sounds like:

Further to “Some wonder: Why didn’t the Higgs boson cause our universe to collapse?”:

The mass of the Higgs boson, about 126 times that of the proton, turns out to be “right on the edge,” in terms of the universe’s stability, Carroll said. A little bit lighter, and the Higgs field would be much more easily perturbed; a little heavier, and the current Higgs field would be incredibly stable.

Naw, it must be something like “speculative” cosmic inflation and supersymmetry, right?

One leading possibility, known as the theory of supersymmetry, proposes that there are superpartner particles for all the currently known particles, and perhaps more-powerful particle accelerators could find these particles, Hogan said.

But the theory of cosmic inflation is still speculative, and some physicists hint that what looked like primordial gravitational waves to the BICEP2 telescope may actually be signals from cosmic dust in the galaxy, said Sean Carroll, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology and author of The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World.

And over the hills and far away.

See also: The Science Fictions series at your fingertips (cosmology).

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