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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."
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.
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?
... (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