As is often the case in the zigzag progress of science, however, that’s not what Dr. Higgs thought he was doing. When he invented his boson in 1964, he said, “I wasn’t sure it would be important.”
.. His first paper on the subject was rejected. He rewrote it, spicing it up with a new paragraph at the end, emphasizing the prediction of a new particle.
.. He was trying to work on a fashionable new theory called supersymmetrythat would further advance the unification of forces, but “I kept making silly mistakes,” he said. Indeed, he told the BBC last winter that his lack of productivity probably would have gotten him fired long ago if he had not been nominated for a Nobel Prize.
.. Moreover, lacking any evidence for supersymmetry or a more encompassing theory, physicists can’t explain the mass of the Higgs itself, which standard quantum calculations suggest should be almost infinite. This has led some theorists to propose that our universe is only one in an ensemble of universes, the multiverse, in which the value of things like the Higgs is random.
Time is an emergent phenomenon
But it didn’t take physicists long to realise that while the Wheeler-DeWitt equation solved one significant problem, it introduced another. The new problem was that time played no role in this equation. In effect, it says that nothing ever happens in the universe, a prediction that is clearly at odds with the observational evidence.
.. But the results depend on how the observation is made. One way to do this is to compare the change in the entangled particles with an external clock that is entirely independent of the universe. This is equivalent to god-like observer outside the universe measuring the evolution of the particles using an external clock.
In this case, Page and Wootters showed that the particles would appear entirely unchanging—that time would not exist in this scenario.
.. This is an elegant and powerful idea. It suggests that time is an emergent phenomenon that comes about because of the nature of entanglement. And it exists only for observers inside the universe. Any god-like observer outside sees a static, unchanging universe, just as the Wheeler-DeWitt equations predict.
.. Emergence is a popular idea in science. In particular, physicists have recently become excited about the idea that gravity is an emergent phenomenon. So it’s a relatively small step to think that time may emerge in a similar way.