1. The Big Bang is not being reproduced at CERN. The Big Bang was first and foremost the creation of space and time. It cannot be reproduced within space and time. Even so, in a very indirect way, the ATLAS experiments may teach us something about the Big Bang. See below.
2. The experiments at CERN will create conditions under which the so-called Standard Model, the theory which describes Electro-Magnetism and the force called "Weak Interaction", should cease to be valid. The Standard Model has a built-in validity limit. At energies above the so-called Higgs mass there is not much reason to believe the theory can hold. In the propaganda, it is said that physicists want to show that the Higgs boson exists. I cannot understand how someone who understands the Standard Model can honestly expect the Higgs boson to exist. A few months from now the headlines will say that the search for the Higgs boson has brought surprises.
3. I have seen hugely distorted claims about "Higgs". It is claimed that the Higgs boson explains how elementary particles get mass, or even how anything gets mass. In reality, the Higgs boson explored by ATLAS has nothing to do with the masses of protons and neutrons. A macroscopic body derives almost all of its mass from its constituent protons and neutrons. The massiveness of protons and neutrons is not coming from the Higgs mechanism. They are composite particles, and their mass equals their energy content, which is predominantly due to the Strong Interaction.
4. The Higgs mechanism in the Standard Model is a sophisticated but artificial mathematical device, used to "give mass" to the W and Z bosons, the particles that intermediate the Weak Interaction like the photon intermediates Electro-Magnetism, and to elementary fermions that carry both electric and weak charge - electrons and quarks. The massiveness of the W and Z bosons and the short-range nature of the Weak Interaction are almost synonymous notions. One could more modestly say that the Higgs boson was introduced to explain why the Weak Interaction works only at very short distances despite its kinship to the Electro-Magnetic force, which works over long distances.
5. The last statement illustrates the nature of the Higgs mechanism. It is an attempt to describe what is called symmetry breaking. Though symmetry breaking is a fact of Nature, and thus must be an essential ingredient of the theory, its expression in terms of the Standard Model's Higgs boson is not.
6. Despite the artificial nature of the Higgs sector of the Standard Model, theorists have used it to audaciously explore aspects of symmetry breaking in the very early Universe, its so-called inflationary phase, and to explain how a once very uniform Universe could have generated its current level of inhomogeneity. It is because of this that the upcoming experiments will have impact on our understanding of the Big Bang. I estimate that a lot of the Higgs-based stuff will turn out to be wrong.
7. The realistic expectation is that the experiments will reveal new physics - aspects of reality that are really different from what we know and that we have not been able to guess. I estimate that the new physics will spur great progress towards understanding all forces of Nature in a unified way - a sine qua non for understanding the primordial evolution of the Universe, and key to understanding how everything came from One.
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