> > IF CONFIRMED is my editorializing on the article. The Big Crunch has been out of favor for years. The best recent guess has been space is flat and Heat Death is the proper end to expect, 100 billion years from now.These are scientific 'consensus'thoughts, now that the current age of peer review allows consensus control in science, like the Global Warming consensus. Never mind acceptable proof.
> 
> I find it unlikely that its consensus just yet; I only say this because it was only this time last year where I remember SciAm reporting on the "infinite, empty, and cold" death of the universe. I'll stay on my fence, as I am wont to do, heh-The SciAM infinite, empty, and cold death is the same as the phrase 'heat death', used in past discussions elsewhere. Heat is dead, or gone. Kind of a silly twist on words and meanings.

George: Reviving an old thread here.
> It seems the Big Crunch is back on the agenda
> 
> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131212113034.htm
> 
> Or a new form of Collapse of the Universe 
> due to a glitch in the Higgs Field.
> 
> But apparently the discovery of one new particle 
> may contradict the whole thesis!-Thanks George for the reference. I've not been following closely for two days with other issues taking my time. I never realized retirement could be so time consuming. -Science news writers always like to hype the research to mean more than it does:-"collapse of the universe will happen if a bubble forms in the universe where the Higgs particle-associated Higgs-field will reach a different value than the rest of the universe. If this new value means lower energy, and if the bubble is large enough, the bubble will expand at the speed of light in all directions. All elementary particles inside the bubble will reach a mass that is much heavier than if they were outside the bubble, and thus they will pull each other into supermassive centers. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Southern Denmark" -The double "ifs" put the entire conjecture into never-never land. Mark Strassler, whose blog I follow, points out that it is important to imagine strange new universes because it opens up areas and ideas for theoretical particle physicists to explore and occasionally stumble into a really important insight. This study is that sort of 'what if' approach, and is taken too seriously by the science writer. The current Higgs, according to Strassler, should be stronger to fit current theories, and in fact there may be as many as 5 Higgs, but the studies need to be at much higher energies than have been available. The LHC will go to higher levels in two years. But the geometry of space-time still favors flatness and continuing expansion. The increased speed of that expansion is certainly not fully understood, requiring the assumption of 'dark energy". I don't buy an outlook for 'crunch' Although Steinhardt keeps pushing for it.

GEORGE: Reviving an old thread here.
It seems the Big Crunch is back on the agenda-http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131212113034.htm-Or a new form of Collapse of the Universe 
due to a glitch in the Higgs Field.
But apparently the discovery of one new particle 
may contradict the whole thesis!-Thank you for this, George. Here are two quotes that deserve the Royal Society Gold Medal for Nebulosity:-"The phase transition will start somewhere in the universe and spread from there. Maybe the collapse has already started somewhere in the universe and right now it is eating its way into the rest of the universe. Maybe a collapse is starting right now right here. Or maybe it will start far away from here in a billion years. We do not know," says Jens Frederik Colding Krog.-Although the new calculations predict that a collapse is now more likely than ever before, it is actually also possible, that it will not happen at all. It is a prerequisite for the phase change that the universe consists of the elementary particles that we know today, including the Higgs particle. If the universe contains undiscovered particles, the whole basis for the prediction of phase change disappears.
"Then the collapse will be canceled," says Jens Frederik Colding Krog.-www.AgnosticWeb.com is proud to bring you the very latest findings of its own research team:-"Following our prediction that the indefinite article particle is bound to be found," says Professor dhw, "I can reassure the world that the universe has not begun to collapse, and will not even begin to collapse within the next billion years. My team and I are prepared to bet on this at odds of 1 billion to 1. Stakes (not less than $100) should be sent as soon as possible, please, by electronic transfer to The DHW Space Research Centre, Taunton, England."