The Higgs boson may be key to understanding the first moments of the universe. If the early universe was too disordered, everything would have collapsed into black holes moments after the big bang. Luckily, this didn’t happen, and some new calculations suggest the Higgs boson could be the reason why.

Near the start of the beginning of the universe, everything was compressed into a very small space. Then, a process called inflation took over, rapidly expanding space …