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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."
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.
but seriously, if it came back through time we should be able to detect it.
I remember when that happened to me, in 2024...
Life hasn't been the same until.
What did you say?
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
I'm thinking noodly appendages are involved.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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.
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
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
The difference between theory and practice is that nothing in the universe actually conforms to your perceptions and everything you know is not even wrong. You are not even really "you" in any sense beyond the illusory narrative created by the mind, to order its disparate sensations.
Black hole? Maths say they exist - but you will never really know, nor will it ever really matter - if you cannot even know your "self".
"In theory there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is". I paraphrase this as:
"To the imagination, it is identical with reality, when Reality is so totally comprehensive that all of imagination is an infinitesimal subset."
But the mind is a little thing - with such a limited set of tools and perceptions, on such a tiny scale.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
[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...
even the mighty slashdot is speechless!
Apparently, several posts that came after yours traveled back through time to prevent you from being first.
/...
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
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?
Actually you kind of are trolling, because that's not what this article is. This is not a "time travel is doing something" article, it's a "two otherwise respectable scientists are saying something pretty crazy" article. And that is notable, because that does not normally happen.
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
Didn't everybody learn about Higgs by watching the last season of Lexx?
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.
My work here is dung.
Information (except its mass, charge, and spin) can't escape a black hole, period. You don't even need to suspect that some difficult concept could plausibly be an exception, because you know there are no exceptions.
If information theory wants to stop us from observing a higgs boson then we won't be able to observe it in the experiment. What won't happen is that every time we try to test it some mechanical component breaks down. That's ridiculous.
A physicist will be able to explain better than I can why entanglement can't be used for information transfer (such as FTL or what you describe), but my simplistic understanding is that in order to observe the spin on the particle, you have to actually observe it, and by observing, you might alter its spin. You have no way of knowing whether the spin you just observed is a legit signal, or a bunk one induced by your measurement.
Any signal transmitted becomes indistinguishable from a random number generator, and you're back to square one.
On the topic of the linked "paper", this seems like the sort of utterly ridiculous nonsense that Penrose or Novikov would cook up (especially the latter). I'm not going to dignify it with a response other than to predict that Occam's Razor will slice it apart.
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
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
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?
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!
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.
You are not even really "you" in any sense beyond the illusory narrative created by the mind, to order its disparate sensations.
That depends very much by what you mean by "illusion", and what you mean by "you". If I identify myself as this particular chunk of matter in the state it is at the moment, then yes, I am me.
It's like describing a program as an illusion. In the sense that it abstract, perhaps. But it does have real, physical consequences -- at the very least, the color of the pixels on your screen (or which ones are lit by how much, if you want to be pedantic).
Black hole? Maths say they exist - but you will never really know... Reality is so totally comprehensive that all of imagination is an infinitesimal subset.
Perhaps. What is your evidence for this?
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.
For example: It was once believed that the earth is flat. But even this is not particularly wrong. On the scales most of us deal with in day-to-day life, a flat earth is a good approximation.
It was once believed that the sun revolved around the earth. This is still a good approximation, for most purposes here on the ground. It is only when we begin to consider the motion of other planets that it becomes important which is which.
People often point to Newton being "disproved" by Einstein, as a way to show how "unreliable" modern science is -- usually in an effort to promote some non-science, such as religion or "Intelligent Design". What they miss is that Einstein was, for all practical purposes, a refinement of Newton -- the Newtonian equations are at the core of the relativistic ones, and most of the time, we still use Newtonian physics, because it's still a good approximation and is easier to calculate.
So while I agree that there is always more to understand, we shouldn't pretend we know nothing simply because we don't know everything.
So, going back to what you've said here:
Black hole? Maths say they exist - but you will never really know,
In the sense that I can "really know" anything beyond the internal consistency of mathematical and logical systems, I can know that black holes exist, until a better explanation comes along. And as I've shown, that "better explanation" probably won't look that different than the one we have now.
For example, it is possible that we are wrong about what the singularity of a black hole looks like. But it seems unlikely that anything would ever make its way back out -- and if it did, it probably would not come back the way it went in. Even if black holes were shown to be an entirely different phenomenon, it seems unlikely we'd show that it isn't somehow swallowing up matter, energy, even light.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
As proof of this, the NY-Times article can only be read by some observers but not others.
Table-ized A.I.
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
Depending on how you reconcile the two, you may not get an actual black hole. (You will get something that behaves quite similarly, but not exactly the same.)
A really, really dark brown hole?
Hmmm... Maybe I need to change my sig for this post!
Putting the "anal" back into "analyst"...
Uhm...you forgot "according to current theory" in that statement. We think there are no exceptions, but if we find one then the theory has to be changed.
Theory is only our current working simulation of how we think the universe works; the universe itself plays by its own rules which may or may not match our theories.
Conjecture on your part, based upon your observations and your personal interpretation of those observations. Whether or not he (or I) ever die is a distant mystery to you and doesn't matter; you should be more concerned with your fate.
See, perspective and philosophy is fun to play with. And my reply to your post is as inane in irrelevant to the subject matter as your reply to the parent was.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Goat C. Worst. Syntax. Ever.
Perhaps the sum of solution spaces where the machine is never turned on is greater than the sum of the solution spaces where it gets turned on but doesn't find what it's looking for?
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..."
A pair of entangled particles has the property that, if someone takes a measurement on each of them, forcing each into one of a pair of eigenstates, knowing which state one of them collapsed into tells you which state the other one collapsed into - even if the separation between the two measurements is spacelike rather than timelike (i.e. even if a signal from one of them "telling" the other which state to pick would have to propagate faster than light.)
But you can't force your particle to pick one of the two options for its own collapse, and thus force the other to pick a state of your choosing and send a bit of information faster than light. The PARTICLE gets to make the pick. You can't distinguish whether the particles communicate FTL, the pick was already made when they initially became entangled and carried by some "hidden variable" until the measurement (though there's reason to believe it's not a hidden variable), they were just predestined to act that way, or whatever. (Physics says WHAT it does but, at least so far, not HOW.)
The most you can do is measure a DIFFERENT thing about the particle when you force the collapse (such as the polarization along a different axis if you're measuring polarization), in which case you lose all knowledge about how the other particle's measurement came out.
So if there is an FTL communications link there, it's useful for the particles but apparently not for us.
This is probably good. If we had a reliable FTL signal link we could pretty trivially (using special relativity and things moving moderately fast) turn it into a future-to-past communication link and blow the hell out of causality. So far the only maybe-future-to-past comm channel that comes out of current paradigms (AFAIK) involves galactic-scale masses and energies.
Does that explanation help?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Kind of a super strong Anthropic principle. "The universe exists because someday, something in the future will require it to."
The English "or" maps to the operator "OR", but the English "either ... or" maps to the operator "XOR".
In other words,
scary or wonderful => scary OR wonderful
either scary or wonderful => scary XOR wonderful
"..."
So gravity doesn't escape a black hole? Then how does gravity pull you closer to it?
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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.
The information is available on the surface of the event horizon by the holographic principle.
And perhaps even larger is the sum of the solution spaces in which their are no humans to build the thing at all.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Doesn't this really just mean that FTL is only possible if there's a preferred frame of reference?
Yep. But such a special frame also pulls the rug out from under both special and general relativity.
Given how well relativity has matched extreme physical phenomena so far it seems unlikely that a special frame with FTL will show up.
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 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
Well, ultimately I need to know if I'm buying any more cat food.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
Been there, did that, and I'm still (POP!) ...
This all sounds super deep and meaningful and all quantumy, but does anybody s'pose that it fails so much because it's just a big damn machine built by hundreds of contractors, many of which will be impressed if it works at all?
+1 Disagree
Some might say that makes sense without the "Goat", too.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
We shouldn't be looking at Schrödinger's death until we solve the mystery of cats.
--
Point the Higgs Bosonator at tomorrow Jeeves, I need a settled bet.
Well "according to relativity", quantum mechanics shouldn't exist either...
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
Goat C. Worst. Syntax. Ever.
Look at it this way. If the number of (one-syllable-name + one-letter) rappers and hip-hop artists continues to increase, then eventually all possible names will be taken. So, unless that trend fades, someday there will be a fresh new urban act called "Goat C". Fate, twisted master that it is, will make this person famous. Just in time for you to have kids or possibly grandkids. And they will ask you if you've seen Goat C, because he's awesome.
And then you will be horrified.
Then the TV ads will start about how Goat C will be appearing live at your local arena. You won't be able to tune it out like other ads, simply because of the surprise the first time you hear it. Every time you hear the baseline that opens the ad, every time you hear his music, everywhere you turn, you hear people praising Goat C or exhorting you to pay money to see Goat C.
Then he will make a remix of your favorite song. So your favorite song will be forever linked to Goat C.
And that is when the nightmares begin.
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
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?