Currently, advances in particle physics essential for further development of theory about  the beginnings of our universe have slowed down to a crawl. The reason--the Higgs particle is still missing.

   The Higgs particle is required in the standard model of quantum theory because it mediates the transformation of energy to mass during the birth of new, fundamental particles. But none of our present crop of super-colliders were able to generate the collisional energy necessary to produce the Higgs. So an urgent task of redesign and rebuilding is now in process but it may take several years before we can know whether the Higgs really exists.

   One result of this slow-down is that the brakes have been taken off for the publication of speculative theoretical papers that otherwise would have gone unpublished unless supporting evidence was available. Another result is that some popular science journals that previously contained much hard science, now print what was formerly unprintable.

   The Big Bang cosmologist though, due to the high productivity of space-based telescopes and the revamping of the Hubble, is not short on hard data. Rather they are short of adequate theoretical back-up to interpret their data.

   One of the basic assumptions in conventional cosmology has been that at the very largest scale, the universe is smooth and homogeneous.

   That is now known to be wrong. Our universe is clumpy. It has vast superclusters of galaxies, the largest of which border upon being a billion light years long and about 300 million light-years wide.

   That brings up the problem of how these massive bodies got to be where they are. Our universe is thought to be about 15 billion years old plus or minus five billion years. But many measurements of the speed at which galaxies move have shown that these seldom exceed 1000 km/second--about 600 miles per second or 1/300th of the speed of light. Hence in a 20 billion year old universe, a galaxy could only have moved about 66 million light years. So how can the current distribution of these superclusters be explained?

   Another problem is the fluctuations observed in the background radiation that indicates there must be at least 10 times more dark matter than visible matter in the universe. But to date there is no hard evidence to account for the discrepancy.

   A further difficulty is with lambda, the cosmological constant that describes the acceleration of the expanding universe. Theory predicts a value that is 10¹²⁰ times larger than the measured value of 1/107. To cope with this huge anomaly, lambda has been allocated a fudge factor based upon an undiscovered mechanism that makes the vacuum energy fit the observations.

   And now we have an even bigger problem--with the fine structure constant, termed "alpha." Four years ago, using the Keck telescope in Hawaii, John Webb and team observed changes in the absorption spectra of elements such as iron, silicon, chromium, and zinc as light from far distant quasars passed through dust clouds containing those elements.

   The implications of this observation were so enormous that four years have now passed in confirming them. Well-known theoretical physicist, John Barrow, joined the group and now, after checks for systematic error due to the telescope plus measurements from more than 100 quasars, states that "there would need to be an unimaginable sequence of coincidences to get such a consistent error," hence he concludes that the results are pretty much undeniably correct. One more check is now in progress--a repeat with an entirely different type of telescope situated in Chile.

   A consequence of the Webb result is a shift in the fine structure constant, known as "alpha," that dictates how photons will be absorbed by electrons in a cloud containing metal atoms. The results from the Webb team make "alpha" slightly smaller than its present value. But since "alpha" is a conglomerate of four other constants (2pe²/hc²), it has wide ranging effects, including the strength of the weak force that affects how radioactive beta decay occurs--and so also how our sun burns.

   However all these effects have been previously checked and rechecked many times over and have always been found to be consistent with the current value of "alpha." The vacuum energy effect is particularly important since the cosmological constant, "lambda," is extremely sensitive to changes in "alpha."  If "alpha's" value is changed to be consistent with the value from the Webb observations it would make the physicist's theoretical early universe expand in a ridiculously fast way.

   As well as bringing problems for certain aspects of the Big Bang picture, a varying "alpha" also brings advantages  One of these concerns the "horizon" problem. Measurement shows that far-flung, opposite sides of the universe are all at much the same temperature. This implies that at some earlier time these parts were sufficiently close to one another for energy to pass between them. But the models of the early universe do not allow this to occur.