What if the higgs boson didn't come to be until, say, xx-billion years post Big Bang. How could we possibly come up with the age of anything out there?

hey, Bob, great to see your interest in the universe has not waned!

I hope you are in good health and you’re not get too roasted by the hot sun, or drenched by unpredictable thunderstorms…

Your question seems to relate to the cosmic history, which is many people‘s favorite topic I believe. 

The Higgs boson is a relatively “new” particle - newly seen in the laboratory -  but nevertheless it’s properties seem to work well with known facts about our cosmos. 

We have a creation scenario which begins with a kind of “wild chaos” and the very beginning, when there is a soup of all sorts of particles plying about with great speeds and with new heavy particles popping into existence. As the melee cools and expands, stable protons and neutrons are able to form without immmediately flying back apart, and then when it cools more, some neutrons and protons fuse into helium nuclei. Then there are some hundreds of thousands of years of further expansion when the universe is still too hot to form neutral atoms.

Finally things cool down enough for neutral atoms to form and electrons cling to protons to make the first Hydrogen atoms.

After this, the atoms slowly cool further and after some time they begin with condense into stars and then the stars coalesce together into galaxies.

I think that in all this, the role of the Higgs boson comes in ONLY in those early moments of the Big Bang long BEFORE we’re at the much later stage of galaxy formation.

The Higgs is involved only at the stage of the very early Big Bang when ”all is chaos” and there are particles going wild at very high temps.

As far as I can tell, the Higgs has nothing to do with finding the age for a galaxy.

Finding the age for a galaxy has to do with the redshift and expansion rate relation of Hubble, the standard distance and age method we have been using for decades now.

No need to worry about anything happening at the level of the Higgs or other particles.

I hope this helps.

nice to talk to you Bob!

Best wishes,

Doug

 Hmmm... Just musing over a thought:

What if the higgs boson didn't come to be until, say, xx-billion years post Big Bang. How could we possibly come up with the age of anything out there