Hickey & Boggs

Some years after the end of "I Spy", Culp and Cosby made a noir film, called "Hickey & Boggs". I remember seeing it, but nothing about it beyond the noir feel of the film, particularly the ending. WikiPedia has more info. Which brings us, mnemonically, to the Higgs Boson. While not quite so noir, also mysterious. If you're not addicted to right wing anti-intellectualism, head to today's NY Times Science Times, which is a Tuesday section, normally devoted to various news of science. Not this week. The entire section, seven of eight pages (the last page is always the astronomical data), tells the story of the Higgs Boson.

There's a sidebar, which has this tidbit:

If that should happen -- tomorrow or billions of years from now -- a bubble would sweep out through the universe at the speed of light, obliterating the laws of nature as we know them.

The quote refers to a discovery made around 1998, that not only was the universe expanding which had been known since the understanding of red-shift by Hubble in 1929, but the expansion is accelerating. This discovery led to the "creation" of dark matter and dark energy, which are the assumed source of the energy necessary to motivate the acceleration. At the macro-level, Newton's laws are still true, so an accelerating universe requires a power source, and rather massive at that.

The accepted theory has been that dark matter/energy acceleration is sufficient to overcome gravity forever, so the universe will sort of end with stars dying as isolated islands out of sight of each other. There is no big crunch and a recycled big bang. The Higgs Boson, if it's really the way it looks, means that we don't end with the cold, empty space, but a slurpy. Call it the Big Bubble.