Such human-induced changes are hypothetical, because the energy required to substantially modify a Higgs field’s value in even a small region of space is enormously beyond what we can muster. (The changes are also hypothetical because the existence of the Higgs fields is still up in the air. Theorists eagerly anticipate highly energetic collisions between protons at the Large Hadron Collider chipping off small chunks of the Higgs field—Higgs particles—that may be detected in the coming years.) But in many versions of inflationary cosmology, a Higgs field would naturally have different values
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