Slashdot Mirror
The LHC, the Higgs Boson, and Fate
Reader Maximum Prophet sends a piece from the NY Times by the usually reliable Dennis Overbye reporting on a "crazy" theory being worked up by a pair of "otherwise distinguished physicists": that the Large Hadron Collider's difficulties may be due to the universe's reluctance to produce a Higgs boson. Maximum Prophet adds, "This happened to the Superconducting Super Collider in the science fiction story Einstein's Bridge. Now Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, are theorizing that it's happening in real life." "I'm talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather."
information theory is weird. for example, it's impossible to create a machine that looks inside a black hole.
Now THAT is a book I'd like to see made into a movie. Put some of the "science" back in Science Fiction.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I think casting Keanu Reeves as Neils Bohr was a stroke of unmatched brilliance.
Lady GaGa is, of course, a surprise as "the loathsome particle". She does a good Burlesconi imitation, all thing considered...
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
We created the universe that we are trying to figure out who made it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
So I can tell my wife that I cannot cook dinner tonight because the result would be so abhorrent that nature might send an agent back in time to destroy me before I can create it. Ergo, any movement toward making dinner could very well result in my demise...so let that be on her conscience.
What, the fuck.
...the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one...
if this is true, it's either scary or wonderful!
Smivs on the intertubes!
Maybe this is the reason why i was never able to finished University , the effect on the universe would have been catastrohpic !
but seriously, if it came back through time we should be able to detect it.
even the mighty slashdot is speechless!
I remember when that happened to me, in 2024...
Life hasn't been the same until.
I'm thinking noodly appendages are involved.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Utter utter bollocks.
He found a practical application for the effect in "Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation" (named in honor of Frank Tipler's paper). The universe hates time machines... so one side of a war works to convince the other side to try to make one.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Everyone knows the time traveler's objective in going back in time is not to kill his own grandfather, but rather to BECOME his own grandfather.
If the event A produces the effect B and that effect B changes the event A to event A1, so, in principle, the event A never ocurred, unless there is a way to observer simultaneously event A and A1.
or im wrong?
that the Higgs boson is abhorrent to Nature is ridiculous.
Please don't anthropomorphize particles. They don't like when you do that.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Kdawson's name is on this, why am I not surprised. I don't mean to troll, but wow does that editor have some interesting stories to his/her name. I mean honestly, a bonified, "time travel is killing the LHC", story?
This theory actually kind of makes sense to me... almost.
If the universe were indeed so much more complex than we imagined (which I fully believe is possible) that something like this could happen, I still don't think it would happen this way - that the future universe is coming back in time, just to break some magnets. Nature is rarely so subtle.
I do believe in the possibility of multiverse theory being correct, which also allows me to believe in some form of time travel, but a more natural extension of this all is that the particles created in the future tear a hole in time-space and destroy the collision center of the machine, not some magnets around the edge (unless an accidental collision occurred elsewhere, i suppose).
Plus, I've never figured out if time-space would follow the earth in its orbit, or if these things would just happen out in space somewhere, at the spot in orbit the earth was going to be at.
I really hope this is kind of correct, or the universe would be a much less interesting place. I fear that one day we'll figure everything about this stuff out, and that it won't be a magical world of multiverses and time travel.
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
I dunno, the more I keep seeing the LHC fail and fail is that we may be experiencing quantum suicide. In each reality that the LHC properly starts up and smashs atoms, the world ends as we know it. We keep experiencing a version of reality where cirmstance is preventing the Hiigs Boson from being created. For those unfamiliar with the concept, here's the thought experiment behind the theory straight from Wikiepdia:
One example of the thought experiment is: a man sits down before a gun, which is pointed at his head. The gun is rigged to a machine that measures the spin of a quantum particle. Each time the trigger is pulled, the spin of the quantum particle is measured. Depending on the measurement, the gun will either fire, or it won't. If the quantum particle is measured as spinning in a clockwise motion, the gun will fire. If the particle is spinning counterclockwise, the gun won't discharge; there will only be a click.
The man now pulls the trigger. The gun clicks. He pulls the trigger again, with the same result. And again; the gun does not fire. The man will continue to pull the trigger again and again with the same result: The gun won't fire. Although it's functioning properly and loaded with bullets, no matter how many times he pulls the trigger, the gun will never seem to fire.
Go back in time to the beginning of the experiment. The man pulls the trigger for the very first time, and the particle is now measured as spinning clockwise. The gun fires. The man is dead.
But the problem arises; the man already pulled the trigger the first time — and an infinite amount of times following that — and we already know the gun didn't fire. How can the man be dead? The man is unaware, but he's both alive and dead. Each time he pulls the trigger, the universe is split in two. It will continue to split, again and again, each time the trigger is pulled. This thought experiment is called 'quantum suicide'. It was first posed by theorist Max Tegmark in 1997. However, science fiction author Larry Niven originally proposed a fictional variant of quantum suicide in his short story All the Myriad Ways in which the protagonist's final action in the story kills/fails to kill him in myriad alternate realities.
With each run of the experiment there is a 50-50 chance that the gun will be triggered and the experimenter will die. According to the Copenhagen interpretation, the gun will (in all likelihood) eventually be triggered and the experimenter will die (assuming the experimenter allows the wavefunction/spinor of the particle to evolve back to its original state after each attempt). If the many-worlds interpretation is correct then at each run of the experiment, the experimenter will be split into one world in which he survives and another world in which he dies. After many runs of the experiment, there will be many worlds. In the worlds where the experimenter dies, he will cease to be a conscious entity.
However, from the point of view of the non-dead copies of the experimenter, the experiment will continue running without his ceasing to exist, because at each branch, he will only be able to observe the result in the world in which he survives, and if many-worlds is correct, the surviving copies of the experimenter will notice that he never seems to die, therefore "proving" himself to be invulnerable to the gun mechanism in question, from his own point of view.
If the many-worlds interpretation is true, the measure (given in M.W.I. by the squared norm of the wavefunction) of the surviving copies of the experimenter will decrease by 50% with each run of the experiment, but will remain non-zero. So, if the surviving copies become experimenters, those copies will either die in the first shot, or survive creating duplicates of themselves (copies of copies, that will survive finitely or die).
This signature was left intentionally blank.
This "theory" is horribly bad, inconsistent with modern concept of time and light-cones, but would make a kick-ass book or movie. Hollywood, you know what to do!
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
[citation provided]
I got a particular kick out of the phrase "otherwise distinguished physicists" in the summary.
...but did you notice no one mentioned that it is simply hard to create the conditions necessary to detect the Higgs boson? We too quickly opt for the sci-fi answer and though the idea of time based sabotage is fun, it makes for a better movie than it does an answer. And how was such a conjecture published without data or peer review? Nothing to see here, next particle please...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_interpretation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheeler–Feynman_absorber_theory
[quote]the Large Hadron Collider's difficulties may be due to the universe's reluctance to produce a Higgs boson[/quote]
Let's apply Occam's Razor. One of two cases must be true, either:
(a) "the Large Hadron Collider's difficulties may be due to the universe's reluctance to produce a Higgs boson"
or
(b) building a machine like this is rather complicated and it might take a few goes before they get it right.
Of course, there could be an option (c) they really suck. I'll try that on my boss the next time I fuck something up. "No, see, it's not that I'm not any good at my job, it's that the universe is conspiring against the proper completion of the project. Have I ever mentioned Schroedinger's Cat?"
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Didn't everybody learn about Higgs by watching the last season of Lexx?
became literary theory.
Get back to work you lazy sods.
Yours In Elektrogorsk,
Kilgore Trout
as stated in the article. I think it is very much a part of "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy"
I don't know anything about Ninomiya, but Nielsen is an established High Energy Theorist at a reputable institute (I've attended lectures given by him). I still think the theory is just too far out, but then again, I would have said the same about quantum mechanics (which at least has the advantage of being testable).
Reading TFA, Nielsen sounds like a reasonable guy, and this sounds like little more than idle speculation from a scientist who does real science. And he welcomes skepticism to his idea. It's still interesting to me that this sounds patently anti-scientific. Science is founded on the idea that our universe is predictable and that we can understand it. Saying "we might not be able to find this out because it's fate" seems closer to "We can never understand our own origins because a mysterious intelligent designer created us" in spirit than I would be comfortable with if I were the scientist who said it.
Don't take this as saying this guy is in the same category as an IDer, that's not at all what I mean. Dr. Nielsen isn't saying we shouldn't try this anyway, wheras IDers do discourage inquiry into evolutionary biology, and more importantly Dr. Nielsen is suggesting an explanation to a phenomena wheras IDers are just trying to convince people to join their church.
OK, who is channeling the Univers(al)?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
by John Gribbin, (Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, 105(2):120?125, Feb 1985). In that story a powerful particle accelerator seemingly fails to operate, for no good reason. Then a physicist realizes that if it were to work, it would effectively destroy the entire universe, by initiating a transition from a cosmological false vacuum state to a lower-energy vacuum state. In this story, the explanation of the failures assumes a many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. So instead of explicit backward causality, there is effective backward causality: only the branches of reality with equipment failures contain observers; therefore, observers can only experience histories with equipment failures. The effect is the same.
I also discussed this idea in the context of novel models of computation in my MIT Ph.D. thesis, Games, Puzzles, and Computation (section 8.2; also published as a book by A.K. Peters). The idea was a bit similar to Nielsen and Ninomiya's proposed experiment. It turns out that by connecting an accelerator capable of destroying the universe to a computation depending on random numbers, one could in principle solve problems that are otherwise intractable. I termed this "doomsday computation", as a variation on the similar concept of "anthropic computation" proposed earlier by Scott Aaronson.
A book by James P. Hogan. In the novel they built a large collider and produced microscopic black holes accidentally. Their future selves found a way to send a message back in time despite the noise degradation to tell their past selves not to turn the damned thing on.
It was Chrono ... Chrono something.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
My work here is dung.
Supercollider? I just met her!
These scientists obviously never heard of Ockham's Razor. The fact that these particles have not been found could not be because they don't exist... no, it must be that they're are conspiring with the universe to deny us knowledge of their existence! I think they watched the Wizard of Oz just a few times to many. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain...
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
Isn't one of the defenses of the safety of colliders such as the Large Hadron that natural collisions at even higher energy levels happen all the time in the universe, just not in front of a sensor that can accurately measure it? Therefore, scientists aren't doing anything that isn't "supposed" to happen. Or maybe it's the _observation_ that isn't supposed to happen. (-;
Did anyone tried to fix LHC by waterboarding main scientist? Today I was trained at my workplace to think outside the box.
839*929
Ewwwwwwww....I think you just described your own grandmother as a GILF.....
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
It has a serious, and might I saw, rather obvious flaw
If the activation of the LHC created some kind of cataclysmic event which would some fuck up time to the extent of violating causality, and if the universe does indeed have causality as a boundary condition, then there are far more probable ways of averting the fatal collision than screwing up several tonnes of magnet months before the high energy firings were scheduled to take place.
The universe could simply induce a sufficient e/m force to stop the proton beams colliding. It wouldn't take much, on a cosmic scale, and would be a far more likely outcome than an entire macroscopic object being foobared just to protect the continuity of the universe.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
So the formation of the Higgs comes back from the future to stop its own creation...
If only the destruction of these physicist's careers could have come back from the future and saved themselves from it.
Anyone knows how to get to the enchantment under the sea dance? I was told that a weird, translucent, guy will play the guitar there...
Conversely, with the same premise you could draw a different conclusion, that no where in the future is a particle discovered that is so awesome that ripples in time space must confer that awesomeness on those prior eras that lacked it.
All these LHC physicist have essentially been out of a job for awhile. They need to come up with something to keep them looking busy.
I have to point out that this is merely superstitious thought; there is no evidence to indicate that this is the reason why the collider failed, and while the theory *is* possible, it defies rationality. The simplest/most obvious explanation is the the collider simply failed due to technical reasons due to flaws in design or construction. Anyone could tell you that. Saying that it didn't happen because the Universe simply didn't allow it is the same as if you just substituted "God" for the word "Universe." Why didn't X happen? God didn't allow it. Why did Y happen? God made it happen. I'm not saying that it's wrong to believe in God, but these "explanations" are really non-explanations.
Next they'll tell us that we live in an electrified universe!
If they're right, what's the point in further funding?
Fry: [discussing Fry being his own grandfather as a result of going back in time and getting with his grandmother] I did do the nasty in the past-y.
Nibbler: Verily. And that past nastification is what shields you from the brains!
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Ah, says Man "But the Higgs boson is a dead giveaway, isn't it? We found it with our new-fangled LHC and It proves you exist, and therefore you don't. QED!" (waits for puff of smoke, quickly attempts to knock up proof that black is white, identifies location of nearest pedestrian crosswalk)
"What Higgs boson? What LHC?" says God, winking.
This is ridiculous and not worthy of any publication, let alone the NYT (and should not be propagated on slashdot, imho).
In short, the Higgs boson (if theories are correct) is a scalar that provides mass to all particles. That means it is present at all times everywhere. So, although it is tongue in cheek, we are swimming in an invisible soup of Higgs particles at each moment. To say that universe doesn't want us to create one is like saying people are born blind because the universe didn't want us to experience light.
By their own theory, every event in history delaying the creation and operation of the LHC would have to be included. Not least of which would be the destruction of the Great Library at Alexandria, which probably set back the experiment by a thousand years. Very silly. Who funds these guys?
-- thinkyhead software and media
At every point in time multidimensions branch off.
The discovery of the higgs destroys the dimension in which it is discovered.
We are still here to observe the lack of a higgs so in our dimension discovery failed.
Therefore, Observers can only exist in dimensions where the ability/device to discover the higgs fails.
Not a new idea; I read a short story (blanking on the title, sorry) written by the Russian SF authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky sometimes in the seventies. In the story, a physicist teetering on the brink of a major discovery that would change the Universe gets interrupted in his work by weirder and weirder occurences, including a gun-toting dwarf. After reflection he realizes it's a reaction from the Universe, which tends to conserve its state, under some kind of Le Chtelier's principle.
a lesson in not changing the past from Mr. I'm My Own Grandpa...
If this particle gives parent child particles mass, then why would nature be against it?
It exists, it seems to exist in anything that isn't a photon. Why on earth would nature complain about its existence if it exists in all matter?
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
As proof of this, the NY-Times article can only be read by some observers but not others.
Table-ized A.I.
After all, the LHC will displace the Tevatron, and Fermilab did make the parts that went "boom".
I had the same thought while reading TFA. Literal translation of Russian title is "A Billion Years Before the End of the World" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitely_Maybe_(novel)
the Universe doesn't want to show us what a Higgs looks like. Because then it would have to kill us.
He's just defending his intellectual property.
He can't do it through normal legal channels because Satan pwns all the lawyers.
Anyway, that's what I heard from a friend whose cousin knows Glenn Beck's landscaper.
Suggesting new tag for this one - "Great Scott!"
Ha ha!
How chauvinistic! But of course, who but a human would think that a human's mind would be so powerful that the mere observation of a revealing "secret" of the universe would be a threat to it?
Honestly, this is beyond illogical. It may be a fact that the universe thinks and is aware of itself, but to think that it would be protecting itself from humanity learning about it in some way is ludicrous when presented with the infinite number of other ways it could restrict humans from discovering the Higgs boson.
Let's instead consider a more plausible scenario: The LHC is an enormous undertaking that goes beyond any attempt of artifice made before involving particle collision and it is very likely it will have many setbacks.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
... (some time between fall '63 and spring '65) I wrote a short story with a similar premise:
The government's physicists had identified a way to create such a "bounce" situation by a nuclear mumbo-jumbo that starts with putting together a dense enough energy packet. This backs the universe up a bit and it takes another alternative timeline. Humans have just enough psi to make different decisions. The more energy you use to start the process, the farther back the "time bounce" to the fork. Or at least that's the theory.
The government has taken advantage of this by creating a secret project: They are collecting and storing a LOT of energy using a solar power satellite. (The downlink is a laser and the ground-based collector and energy storage tech, like the details of the bounce device, are unspecified.) Accumulation of energy is ongoing, so they continue to have enough to bounce back at least to the time when the project was initiated. (Going farther risks taking a fork on which the device is not made.)
This is used by the diplomats as a way to correct mistakes: If things got too bad diplomatically they could go back and try something different. (Unlike a doomsday device you WANT to keep this one secret - and for there to be only one.)
Since the project went online, though there have been many conflicts and near-misses on situations with the potential to degenerate into something that would make WW II or a comet impact look tame, things have always worked out for the government in question. Sometimes by smart diplomacy, sometimes by smart battle strategy in small conflicts heading off large ones, sometimes by seemingly amazing coincidences and blind luck. Starting as one country on Earth (where the device is still sited) the government has (mostly peaceably) unified/absorbed/explored/grown into a multi-solar-system empire.
The kicker is that, from the viewpoint of the operators (from which it is was written) EVERY use is the FIRST use. It ALWAYS appears that things have miraculously gone so well that they haven't needed it - until JUST NOW. Maybe the thing really doesn't work - in which case it will destroy the planet and life on most of the spiral arm. Maybe it does work - but from the viewpoint of the current timeline it's just the end of the universe. Maybe the diplomats and generals, knowing this is a possibility, have gone to heroic efforts and pulled out heroic saves - until JUST NOW. But now it's finally hit the fan and the viewpoint characters have been ordered to set it off ...
One of the others in that class was the guy who was the model for Aahz in Asprin's books. Ran into him a decade or two later. He brought up the story and said it had haunted him ever since. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
>> "are theorizing that it's happening"
Get the terminology right! Remember the whole Evolution is "just a theory" thing? Theories must be supported by factual evidence, and be subjected to peer review.
As it stands, these guys are "hypothesizing."
--==>>BobT>
Get back to work.
in my opinion. Nature requires a self-consistent chain of causality from past to future, with no time travel miracles allowed. It does not require the whole chain to remained nailed to a hypothesized immutable historic 'past'. I don't mean that there are 'many worlds' or existent alternative realities, I mean that the one existent history is free to drift around as long as it does it in a physically consistent manner.
What I'm trying to say here, somewhat ineneptly, has so far been prohibitively difficult to prove through experiment, because the experiments are all conducted from within the causal chain on certain kinds of simple, isolated systems. Very hard to measure in a repeatable lab experiment is not the same as unreal however. And I think that something like this will be shown eventually.
Whether this applies to the situation with the Higgs particle I have no idea, but I think the broader principle is sound.
I am getting some of those. So much for saving money for food, damn science..
The Matrix computer isn't powerful enough to handle the simulation of the LHC correctly. That's why the LHC failed.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
"...like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather."
-You mean, like the time Fry went back and killed his grandfather, and then "Did the nasty in the past-y"?
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
I'm hoping the universe protects itself by producing a spelling mutation: the Higgs Bison, which walks out the second they switch it on.
Table-ized A.I.
Correct me if I am wrong, off what I have heard (and probably on Slashdot so take it with a grain of salt)...
Energies of LHC are already found when cosmic rays hit earths upper atmosphere... its just that we have no way of observing them.
So I would believe that whatever is going to happen inside LHC already happens....
Unless this theory is true and the Higgs boson really doesn't let Cosmic rays hit the atmosphere either... Maybe that is why we are all alive instead of Cosmic rays frying all living matter from earth.
Maybe our universe is just an experiment of an extra-universal intelligence that doesn't want us to find out.
We've already been given a warning:
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap030630.html
Any further attempts will result in the Mother of All BSOD's, and there's no F8.
Table-ized A.I.
I am truly humbled by your words, StikyPad. We cannot permit your wisdom to be restrained any longer! You must go to that Siren that has ensnared you, and proudely proclaim that you will once again wander the Earth, for the Slashdotters need your words! (And if she likes, she can tag along, but it's Fast Food from here on out.)
"When I am king, you will be first against the wall..."
I made a joke about something like that here the other day. I don't put any stock in the belief, but it is interesting to think about.
Your brain is not a computer.
This seems to be an equally non-intuitive sort of prediction. I suppose they have the maths to back their theory up?
So, if there are ripples being sent back in time to sabotage the collider now, that must mean that they were successful in the future at causing something so terrible that it's sending ripples back to now. It's unstoppable. It's already happened.
And that past nastification requires some serious calculus to comprehend.
Hey, even you didn't include his wife in the count!
I've read that one. The universe decides that, if side A hadn't tried to convince side B to build a time machine, it wouldn't have been built - so it destroys side A.
Is truly almighty, can even change past to make humanity could only have faith in it, not science to prove that it exist.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
This is where the credibility of the article went south in my book. That kind of sh8t happens all the time. That's why there are big-ass Apollo rockets sitting outside space museums. (Unless Apollo almost found the Moon Obelisks.)
Table-ized A.I.
You know, when someone says something isn't found because it goes back in time to prevent you from being able to see it...
Truth, Just Us, And Hatred For All Mankind!
A key plot point was that the message sending machine was also the receiver, so the earliest time they could send messages to was when the machine was first turned on.
Which is why we must invent the time machine before turning on the earth destroying LHC! Otherwise, how are our future selves going to warn us not to do it?
...in "Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation", in 1977:
http://authors.wizards.pro/books/titles/50243/rotating-cylinders-and-the-possibility-of-global-causality-violation
"Einstein's Bridge" seems to be twenty years later.
When it could simply give a small nudge to any proton in the collider beam that would otherwise have participated in a Higgs-producing collision? Or cause an alpha particle to flip a bit somewhere in the LHC electronics such that the Higgs event goes unnoticed? Or one of any number of other ways to render the Higgs unobserved with minimal effort? After all, there is a small but significant probability of the Higgs existing at the expected energy level and yet being missed by the planned experiment through sheer chance. Why would the universe simply arrange for that to happen rather than making massive interventions?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
This is a letter held in trust since 1905 at the firm of Brown, Ellison and Parker. They told Einstein to do this, and now we are delivering this letter to you. We have kept it sealed since then, and were told to deliver it to this address at this date. Please sign here.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
It's the Mancattan Project.
Table-ized A.I.
Is this something like saying the universe is written in Ada?
We are showered by particles with energies far above that which can be produced in the LHC.
I have a theory. It's called the "Bureaucratic Inverse Competence" theory. BIC states that the quality of work done in any organization is quantity whose direct inverse is the number of sycophantic bureaucrats. As the ratio of actual working operators and engineers to parasites increases, so too does the production and quality increase.
tldr; It ain't the universe, it's too many parasites, and too much money. Heck no I don't have a solution. I'd be a very rich man if I did.
^..^
by Connie Willis. (A book I like very much). Time travel to the past is fine, but you can't change the past in ways that would change history.
...or maybe it's because the LHC is a extremely complex machine that is unprecedented in human history with millions of parts that must work together within very narrow parameters.
Just because a few experimental rockets blew up doesn't mean the universe didn't want us to go into space. Just because a few experimental planes crashed doesn't mean the universe didn't want us to break the sound barrier. These physicists should get off the ganga and give each other 14TeV dope slaps for coming up with such a retarded idea.
Plus maybe a slightly smaller dope slap to /. for putting crazy in quotation.
The idea that the universe somehow doesn't want something to happen, and so causes various improbable events to occur on the macro-level to prevent that thing to happen, is a fairly common SF plot. I even recall an SF-detective variant where the universe was arranging to kill scientists who would discover its secrets (eventually stopped when the detective demonstrated that leaving a trail of bodies is a poor way to hide anything).
It's hard to see a real physicist taking it seriously, except out of pure frustration or inebriation.
[...] its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.
Well, then I recommend you read Rant by Chuck Palahniuk.
This makes me think of Fritz Leber's short story "TRY AND CHANGE THE PAST". Where the main character is travels in time to prevent a death by gun shot, and is thwarted by the Universe using a meteorite (the size of a bullet) to kill the person anyway in the same place the bullet would have. He came up with a law called the "Law of Conservation of Reality" to describe this effect by the Universe. It was a very interesting story, one of those I remember from time to time.
It's obvious that the troubles at the LHC are caused by Picard disregarding the Prime Directive to save us from ourselves.
----
Tablet PCs @ Feed Distiller
the only way to know for sure is to run other experiments before trying to create a Higgs boson.
If it runs reliably for lots of other experiments, then blows up when they try for the Higgs boson, this theory might be possible. They would only need to prove it's repeatable then, which could be very expensive.
If they go straight for the Higgs boson and it blows up, it could still be a design flaw in the collider, which would make it an inconclusive test.
My money is on design flaw or faulty parts. lex parsimoniae. It would be wise to try other experiments first so the result would be meaningful if the Higgs boson experiment takes it out again.
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
my anti-matter self can escape ... isn't that what Hawking Radiation is all about ? I go in one side and come out on the flip side as opposite me ?
in time, it would create a paradox that would split off into it's own pocket dimension and as such, not be noticed by us.
BTW, nature doesn't 'know' anything.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Wire it up to an optical detector and have it start only if it lands on 13.
Then either the detector or the die will refuse to land on 13 if it's true.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Does it explain why, if the Universe is so loath to produce a Higgs boson, it bombards our atmosphere when enormously high energy particles that can create Higgs bosons if they exist? Why hasn't it propagated back in time to stop cosmic rays? It sounds far more like fiction, and inconsistent fiction at that.
This older writeup describes a similar idea:
http://www.everything2.com/title/CERN+and+the+Anthropic+Principle
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
I could far easier believe that if anything continued to go wrong with the LHC, it would be some workers on the project that are in fear of it destroying the world, or going against God's will, or who knows what reason; would sabotage the LHC to keep it from operation. Given the large number of people working on the project, I'm guessing it not hard to imagine that at least a few people there have doubts. Or even took the job in order to cause problems.
As has recently been demonstrated we don't actually need to find the Higgs to get a Nobel prize, we just need to show some promise that we might find it....
Holger Bech Nielsen is awesome, really the most geeky of geeks oblivious to his surroundings.
Saw this tv-report once, he was going to meet the queen of Denmark to be knighted or some of the kind. He couldn't put on a tuxedo himself. After his wife had helped him put on the tuxedo and he was all fancy he went out wearing his winter-hood (it was cold outside). After he came out from meeting the queen he reached into his pocket because he felt something strange, and pulled out a pair of gloves (when you meet the queen it's customary to wear gloves when you shake her hand), to which he with a heureka-surprise-kinda-expression on his face announced "OH LOOK GLOVES!".
He has a funny voice to and is enthusiastic about what he does, gotta love him. He attended Mensa-Denmarks 40-year anniversary as a guest-speaker. After 25 minutes we were all simultaneously intrigued and at the same time cracking up because of his character. It was awesome.
I'm conflicted though as to whether I have to hand in my geek-card or not. Got a picture where I'm sitting next to him, and what am I doing? I'm talking with the blonde across the table -.-'
If you quote this signature there'll be 72 copies of Windows ME waiting for you in Heaven.
Nature is trying to prevent discovery since they are going to publish about it in Science.
I'm sorry boss. I couldn't complete that project because the universe doesn't want the project to be completed and so a ripple in time undid the labors that I so diligently performed!
Do I get a promotion now for not pissing off the universe?
There are a lot of simpler explanations to go through before we get to "the universe is screwing around with time to prevent a higgs boson to be created." For example, it could just be that it's freaking hard to build a superconducting supercollider and it's particularly hard to get one working correctly the first time you fire it up. As has been pointed out, interactions at the SSC's energy take place daily in our upper atmosphere and you don't see the universe bending over backwards to prevent that. Any sensible universe would just cause a massive explosion or a black hole or something if it really didn't like the particle you were creating. I honestly don't believe the universe particularly cares and is probably too busy keeping other things (Like the space-time continuum) sorted to worry about us smashing some atoms together.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
This is a message from the future. The Higgs Boson makes wireless networking stop working. We're all on acoustic couplers out here, and the connection is pretty shoddy, so for the love of god don'
CARRIER LOST
Oh, well - it is fun to grin at the coincidence!
Mod parent up!
The author who wrote the NYT article, clearly doesn't know what the Higgs particle really is. Virtual Higgs particles exist everywhere around us. If the universe has a problem with creating real Higgs particles, then that problem should already have presented itself, since cosmic rays in the universe have collided with much greater energy than the LHC would ever produce and therefore such real Higgs should have been produced many times already. There's nothing special about the LHC except for the fact that it has detectors in place to record evidence of the particles that have been produced. Does the universe somehow have a problem with that?
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
...someone seem to want to get it.
But... the future refused to change.
Considering the demographic this is actually pretty likely.
information is ejected back out of a black hole.
"In July 2005, Stephen Hawking published a paper and announced a theory that quantum perturbations of the event horizon could allow information to escape from a black hole, which would resolve the information paradox."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If you had sex with a steamingly hot and stunningly intelligent woman, it is possible that your children would rally the financial support to construct the biggest collider known to man. The universe conspires to prevent this from happening.
It is not me, it is the universe!!!
If you go back in time to before you first met your wife and had a fling with her would that be cheating or would it just be the first time you met your wife.....
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
I believe the technical term for this is "doing the nasty in the pasty"
Been there, did that, and I'm still (POP!) ...
For example: weren't unbounded Higgs bosons last present in large numbers close to the time of rapid cosmic inflation / far greater dominance of dark energy?
One that hath name thou can not otter
A few years ago, during the construction, one of the LHC bigwigs gave a speech (which I later read). At the end he said (paraphrased)
"if the Higgs boson does not exist, we will have to invent it".
He was half-joking I suppose, but that is what they are trying now, basically
I have thought for years, partly via observation of their psychology, that the underlying theory must have serious holes. I suspect the truth is:
1 the Higgs boson does not exist.
2 "dark matter" is BS
3 the Big Bang theory is wrong.
[btw, the Big Bang theory has an amazing number of failed predictions]
First we have furries. Now we'll have bosies!
If they're so hard to produce and so "abhorrent to nature", maybe it would be good to stop trying?
QUANTUM ATHEISM!
http://outcampaign.org/
TFA included a spoiler about the ending of Sirens of Titan. Probably 98% of Slashdotters read that one long ago, but think of the poor soul who is just about to start reading it for the first time and stumbles on this article...
Of course, years before I ever watched Citizen Kane, I already knew the ending. But Sirens is a much better story, so I think the spoiler matters more.
going back? If you went back in time, maybe there wouldn't be any matter or stuff, since it moved forwards in time to now.
According to:
http://public.web.cern.ch/Public/en/LHC/Safety-en.html
The LHC isn't even capable of reproducing energies involved when cosmic rays strike particles in our atmosphere - something that has been happening routinly now for oh I don't know billions of years.
To assert that God or some quantum many worlds nonsense is behind the engineering failures at Cern only makes sense on April first.
We the prophets know when is the LHC going to work again...
it will be 12/12/2012
we told you!
Did anyone else immediately think:
"1500 Megawatt Aperture Science Heavy-Duty Supercolliding Super Button"
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
No fair!!! You changed the outcome by measuring it!
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
From Wikipedia: Retrocausality (also called retro-causation, backward causation and similar terms) is any of several hypothetical phenomena or processes that reverse causality, allowing an effect to occur before its cause.
~~~Please pass the salt, I hate unsalted MD5s
we are trying to detect it using 3D technology. What if the Higgs Boson is more than three dimensional? Remember M-Theory aka Super String Theory, the Universe is made up of many dimensions. Some of those dimensions are so small we cannot see them, and others are so large that they host parallel universes we cannot see nor detect.
Einstein said that time is the fourth dimension and space is the fifth dimension and warped. What if the Higgs Boson exists out of space/time, we'd never be able to see it even if we caused one to be made. What if like the Hawking Paradox with black holes evaporating the mini-black holes caused by the LHC evaporate the Higgs Boson? Maybe sending it somewhere via space/time or a parallel universe or small dimension? Maybe Black Holes and Higgs Bosons travel so far back in space/time that they send matter and energy into the Big Bang event that created the universe, or creates a parallel universe in another dimension?
The explanation that the universe cannot make a Higgs boson because it travels back in time and stops itself from being formed sounds rather silly. I supposed it would be just as silly to say Time Lords exist and Doctor Who used his sonic screwdriver on the LHC so it wouldn't make a Higgs boson so Human Beings would never learn the secret to time travel?
The idea that the Higgs boson would destroy the universe if made, was the same illogical thinking that nuclear scientists had when developing the atomic bomb that smashing atoms would destroy the universe. Think about it, the universe is large and full of matter and energy, and if a nuclear explosion didn't create a chain-reaction that destroyed the universe, then the Higgs boson most likely won't create a chain-reaction to destroy the universe. Physics doesn't work like that and you have to figure in the law of conservation and entropy that limits the effects of matter and energy so that energy is wasted and lost, and thus you couldn't have an infinite series of chain reactions to destroy the universe. Only the area near the LHC would be destroyed if there was an explosion caused by the Higgs boson, not the whole of Europe, not the Earth, not the Solar System, not the Galaxy, and certainly not the universe. We would have discovered a new way of destroying stuff, and life goes on. But I would rather like to think of the positive in which the Higgs boson is discovered and develops a new form of energy that helps humankind get off of fossil fuels.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
God is not a particle, he's just a guy waiting until we figure it out.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
there aren't a lot of links. and I should say I am no expert. But from what I remember these were all failed predictions ==>
--background temperature -in pre-BB world this was correctly predicted (with slightly inaccurate math) to be 3K. BBers predicted values much higher. then when it was measured as 2.8k the BBers claimed they had said this all along
--distribution of galaxies - now observed, clustered not as predicted at all
--gravity waves : not found
--age of Universe: BBers keep waffling massively, see spinning on Hubble deep field, and what they would find
--neutrinos: I'm pretty sure they switched up on what they find, involving these particles, too
up next, the phantom Higgs Boson? I say yes.
I had always felt that these issues are not necessarily related to higgs boson generation but more related to high energy collissions. Should a micro black hole be generated during a collision it could theoretically be generated across spacetime possible affecting LHC equipment in the vicinity (in terms of both space and time, ie. a few days, months, years away and a few kilometers away) of the generated high energy collisions?
If creating a Higgs Boson would destroy the universe, then to exist, this universe would have to be one of those few universes where random occurrences just happen to have, by chance, have sabotaged all attempts to create one so far. Otherwise it would not be here.
The universe is not deterministic. If you got stuck in a loop like that, eventually you'd break out due to some crazy quantum coincidence.
Yep.
In fact I'd expect that the quantum randomness would all come out uncorrelated with the "previous fork" and macroscopic things would quickly diverge as a result. And if I were (re)writing it these days that's what I'd use to avoid infinite loops.
But back then I was a high school kid with very little understanding of quantum mechanics. So I used "psy" instead. (Campbell was still running Analog and was a big fan of Rhine - at least when it came to story premises.)
(Well, actually I had a LITTLE bit of quantum mechanics: I knew that things were lumpy at about the atomic level, important parameters of matter had discrete integer and half-integer values instead of continuous values, and you couldn't measure some stuff below this uncertainty-principle level, with some scientific philosophers speculating that this was because there WASN'T anything below that value. From this much I'd coined the phrase "The universe is a computer simulation and quantum numbers are as far as the computer takes the arithmetic.". I had another story outline based on the premise that the computer gets replaced with a new model that carries the arithmetic out farther, breaking semiconductors, bugs in the simulation were what {had} made ritual magic work before the previous upgrade, and while trying to figure out what happened to tunnel diodes the physicists find some NEW bugs...)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
If this crazy idea did, in fact, turn out to be true. . . It could be used to create an improbability engine.
A device to create a higgs bosun must fail. The most robust the design of the machine, the less likely it is to fail. Therefore, by creating ever more soundly engineered and constructed devices, one could summon forth ever more unlikely events to prevent them from working.
It's a dangerous exercise, though. You can't be sure whether the unlikely event is going to be a simple failure of a (very solidly constructed) superconducting magnet, or something more like a fleet of alien constructor ships arriving to demolish the planet and make way for a hyperspace bypass.
It was completely over the top for humour value. No one is taking this seriously. No one in their right mind anyway. So there's no secret agenda to oppress women here.
The same women that complain about these jokes as being sexist usually have no problem with jokes about men. Get a grip. I'm a fat guy but I still laugh at some fat jokes. It's called having a sense of humour.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Wow: So the future success of the LHC in producing the Higgs Boson is so abhorrent to nature that it causes a bad solder connection it it's own past!? Huh?
This seems to assume that:
and all t just to cause a LHC version of the grandfather paradox!?
Well... Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence... Until then: move along, nothing (sensible) to see here...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitely_Maybe_%28novel%29
...for these guys to switch over and become Religion professors.
Someone reversing the odd circuit? Planning to start taking things out?
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
Allright, is no one thinking of the real cause? Please! The abominable Dr. Higges!
*ducks*
So instead of saying there is no evidence for its existance we say it exists but has the ability to go back to the future.
I think this is a sort of in-joke; or at least I hope it is. I prefer to believe that no scientist would seriously consider this valid.
However, it does raise a couple of interesting points - one is the question of the nature of time; it has never been satisfyingly explained why time is the way it is (if it is). Why is it 1-dimensional and directed? To me, at least, it seems reasonable that the apparent direction of time is connected with the idea that cause comes before effect; so the idea of "effects from the future" would simply be absurd.
The other point is that science is not so much about seeking out the trust, but rather about eliminating un-truths, which is a slightly different enterprise.
As no one in the science community would dare to admit that the Higgs boson cannot be detected simply because it just doesn't exist, they could simply declare it as we wouldn't be able to verify it anyway.
Shouldn't this be tagged "funny"?
My web domain.
"Producing" a Higgs in this sense only means detecting its presence (in)directly. Higgs, if it exists, is ubiquitous in the universe already, saying that its presence is abhorrent to nature is like saying an electron is. Nature is quite comfortable with the presence of all of its particles, and doesn't give a rat's ass if we ever see any of them.
What is cooler? Large Hadron Collider or 600 MPH Pumpkin Cannon. Please vote: http://is.gd/4j4Hp
I am also finding that there is a very high correlation between the multiverses where the LHC doesn't work and those in which I do not win the Lotto and become a billionaire.
While correlation is not causation, I have to wonder... Do I only win the Lotto in the multiverses where the LHC works correctly?
It seems to me that we are refining our understanding of reality, but the subset which we do understand, we understand fairly well. It has been a very long time since we've been truly and profoundly wrong -- and even then, we weren't.
Indeed. There are many things that we know to the true. There are some things that which we know we don't know. And there are a few things that we don't know that we don't know them.
One might also think that Nickelback would be so abhorrent to nature that their music would ripple backward through time and stop them before they started recording music. Yet here we are, stuck in a world with Nickelback.
Maybe time travel isn't necessary. Maybe the production of a Higg's Boson causes the universe to end. If all choices causes the universe to brnach into universes with each of the possible outcomes, then maybe the only universe we can exist in is one where the collider doesn't work. So although >99.9% of all branchings lead to a successful trial (and the end of the universe), the only ones around afterwards are the ones where it didn't work.
***You learn something Every day. And then you die.***
Rips this argument to pieces.
-- Back to the shadows again...
Is no one aware of the previous work of I. Asimov on Thiotimoline in the late 1940s?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I say this is just the universe's version of Quantum Immortality. Every universe where the LHC is successfully run immediately undergoes a new Big Bang, so the only surviving universes are those where the experiment keeps having problems.
All technological societies ( those that would expand across the galaxy being a subset ) would get to the point of building a device to generate a Higgs boson which would initiate destruction of sun/planet/solar system. Thus no technological civilizations would never have a chance to expand and the Fermi paradox is solved.
Ward
. Silence! Be thankful thy species is unpalatable! .
So, the Universe abhors the creation of the Higg's boson so much that if we ever create it, it will time travel back to destory the machine that created it. Either that, or someone screwed up while assembling what might possibly be the most complicated machine ever built.
Whats that thing about simpler solutions?
Could this be the research that spawns the Infinite Improbability Drive?
If attempts to create the Higgs Boson result in something going wrong with the LHC, there is certainly energy involved in causing the breakdown. If that energy could somehow be harnessed and directed, say to a single failpoint - say a motor that consistently explodes when it fails - then the energy from that explosion could be used to drive the ship forward. Just keep attempting to create that abhorrent boson, and harness the explosions that result. Voila!
Or, in the spirit of the original, remove all reasonable failpoints and let it create all kinds of weird effects.
cracks, black cats, and higgs bosons? Got it. Honestly, I'd say it's being suggested CERN integrate a project like Princeton's. Sorting large amounts of random numbers looking for periods of non-randomness. http://noosphere.princeton.edu/
If it is the case that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck, and we notice this, than haven't we then sort of observed the Higgs? If so, then maybe WE ( meaning the inhabitants of Earth ) are going to have bad luck.... 2012 is right around the corner....
(I'm kidding of course - or am I?)
...
If we can trigger the suicide of the universe at will with the LHC, all we need is to give everyone a button to remotely start it up whenever they feel unhappy. The future universes would be filled only with happy people (or none).
I think Carl Hagen is to blame... his
Wikipedia entry mentions he was awarded the Sakurai Prize in 2010.
Another way of looking at it is as an analogy to potential and kinetic energy.
A black hole contains "potential" information that changes to "kinetic", or normal, information (in the form of Hawking radiation) as the black hole dissolves.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
So after doing some digging it turns out that even the authors of the papers admit it is a somewhat shaky proposal. Basically they assumed that something called the action, a quantity in physics usually taken to be real, maybe had an imaginary part and then played around with it a bit and assumed it would have a strong effect on a scalar field (such as the Higgs). They found the imaginary part of the action had a strong dampening effect on actions even if they were minima (which are the usual ones we work with). Basically from what I have read/gathered this imaginary part appears in the form of non-local effects in space-time by forcing a consideration upon an entire trajectory through time not just what is local. So basically it would imply the universe as a whole could be on a trajectory where the Higgs just couldn't be created due to the dampening effects of the imaginary part of the action. No backwards propagating signals or anything...just the way the universe is. Of course the whole thing is pretty shaky (invoking at least two 'tooth faries') but it is fun nonetheless.
Again, answered by my GP post.. if you never see the Higgs boson then you don't know if it's "the curse" or just its nonexistence
But if you attempt to do something that would produce a higgs if it had worked, and you repeatedly find problems then you can look at the statistical liklihood of an accident vs the observed number of malfunctions and come to a degree of certainty about sabotage. That degree of certainty might also be the odds that milennia ago the orbit of an asteroid was perturbed in such a way that destined it to collide with earth on (*grins*) December 21 2012 just prior to the time when the dude who had been collecting data would have sat down to add up the figures. Then no more humans to publicise the fact to anyone who might be watching.
...
Have any one visited http://www.einsteingravity.com/, a scientist also predicts another insane(to me) theory that "Speed of light is constant = zero" to the already existing theory (which is still insane to me) "Speed of light is constant = 3L kilometres/hour..
Look through a box with a pinhole and you will see only part of which you are able to see; for as big that box really is. Remove the box and you will perceive for which your eyes will be able to see and process. You have been limited by the box and maybe even your mind, because you shouldn't be looking trough a box in the first place. :) Same with thinking; try not to think in a vacuum which is created by/for you. Try to think outside the box, because that box is only just a protective vacuum of your limits.
The frequency of light will bounce against your eyeballs which gets translated in the brain to the physical object memorized by you. Mostly, you don't remember the full details of an event which has happened years ago. Try for yourself and remember which color shirt your best friend had on your birthday ten years ago; in most cases these small details get discolored in the brain by other details. It could be even you'd remember green while the shirt was red. Try this with five years ago and the result could still be tainted.
Sound is another frequency, recognized by the brain, through a process of vibration with the ears. We try to remember as much as we can in that grey goo but still, details will get lost in time. This is because we make new neural paths in our head by the minute. So, go call me crazy in advance, but what if ... our brain is a cache connected to a much bigger database and we are just being nodes of such system? I'm not talking about SciFi stories ala Matrix; but rather thinking further than that box is!
I'm not talking about the beginning of all times here, but I'm talking about the past, the present and the future. Look around you, everything you see are the decisions of you and all others around you; everything exists out of a particle of an atom in our universe. Your body is like any physical matter, it's part of space, where reality is created by you; starting at your house. Your reality is your mind, your thoughts and the connections to any other atom on this universe.
That we are connected only with six degrees of separation should be of no surprise, since we all are connected on this world through another. Like said before "All matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves..."
Matter is part of a frequency. Objects are built out of atoms. Structure of matter will change when you amplify it's frequency. Our planet, sun and solar system works on a frequency. Light is part of the visible spectrum where the frequency variates. Maybe you have felt before, time is a growing constant; look to the world, technology, our environment like melting icecaps, environmental impacts and evolution; you will see time is running faster than ever.
Our planet, sun and solar system all work on a frequency. Light and sound are frequencies recognizable in different ways and anything which reflects such frequency gets read by all of us on this planet through our perceptions. Not only electronic devices are having oscillators, but we, humans, are natural oscillators defined to search those which frequency matches us most.
Doesn't that let you think about "what" we are in this universe? We are part of this universe, this planet, this little dot in the galaxy. We create reality as we live. Could it be possible, that all options possible with a decision do exist in an alternative universe as an atom? The universe could be a gigantic library of options possible where we merely selected those which we can really understand about. Our mind could be part of a gigantic library, where choices interact with eachother, just like a computer computes through algorithms.
What if some of us are possible to view such alternate realities or even possible to change the field where the atom is in it's quantum reality; then you are in the field of time travel. What if what we really fe
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..