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The LHC, the Higgs Boson, and the Chicago Cubs
Following up our earlier discussion of the theory that the Higgs boson might time-travel to avoid being found, reader gpronger notes an interview with MIT (and LHC) physicist Steven Nahn, in which he comments on Nielsen and Ninomiya's unlikely-sounding theory. "The premise is fairly crazy, but many things in physics are constructed that way... The difference here is that... previous 'crazy' ideas gave consequences that were clearly testable and attestable to the new nature of the theory, in an objective manner, and involved the behavior of inanimate objects (i.e., not humans). However, in this case, the consequences seem quite contrived... Exactly in line with their argument, I could say that Nature abhors the Chicago Cubs, such that the theory which describes the evolution of our universe prescribed Steve Bartman to interfere on October 14, 2003, extending the 'bad luck' of the Cubbies."
Least coherent summary ever. I read it twice and I'm still not sure I understand what we're talking about.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
If the LHC gets hit by a meteor five minutes before it is next switched on we may conclude that something strange is going on.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Nature *does* abhor the Chicago Cubs. What's your point?
Hope the LHC finds something, and something mysterious and exacting. If nothing governments are very unlikely to fund a 100 billion for a 100 TeV collider. (that would be very strange, the Standard model need some new physics before about 10TeV, to stablise the masses of the W,Z particles).
---
LHC Feed @ Feed Distiller
Turns out, nature DOES abhor the Cubs. Showed you, mr fancy physicist guy.
This might simply be a matter of physicist humor not translating into reporter humor: Physicist says, "Maybe we're violating the laws of the universe and it's out to get us (chuckle, chuckle)." Reporter thinks, "That sounds like front-page news!"
I don't believe in luck. The problem at the LHC that occurred over a year ago was a mistake and not the machine destroying itself in some weird physics different universe crap. The Chicago Cubs aren't doing well because well, maybe they're a bad team. Like a really bad team and need to do a complete overall to maybe start doing well. For the record I hate baseball and I don't care or follow it.
that is right the cubs must win it all before the World can end also the maybe the LHC can take out the Earth but the universe? other allens out there likely have much better tech.
also is the goat tied to this as well? and we need game 7 to be at 1060 west addison and WE NEED TO DROP THE ALL STAR GAME COUNTING.
at least the blackhawks and bears look good this year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Bartman_incident
http://baseball.wikia.com/wiki/Steve_Bartman
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/eticket/story?page=bartman
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/cubfan1.html
http://www.tampabay.com/sports/baseball/rays/article998054.ece
Osama Bin Laden is safer walking down the streets of New York City than Steve Bartman is walking down the streets of Chicago.
I could believe that there was some strange time-travel-effects going on to prevent this poor Boson, but I can't imagine that it would establish itself as suspicious high-level events such as meteorite impacts or whatever "chance" events people are going on about. If it is happening I bet it is in the form of some new repulsive force that doesn't follow from other theories, or something basic like that. Something we will be able to measure and something we will probably be able to take advantage of.
http://hasthelhcdestroyedtheearthyet.com/
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
This whole 'theory' really just sounds like an application of the Novikov Self-Consistency Conjecture to particle physics. The short version is: the probability of events which could lead to a violation of causality is zero. So, according to this conjecture if the manifestation or observation of the Higgs Boson eventually lead us to develop technology with which we might otherwise violate causality, we'll never discover it.
I can think of at least one way it might - the Higgs Boson is critical to our understanding gravity. We know from relativity that there are certain gravitric structures which might potentially lead to violations of causality. One example is a toroidal singularity, spun extremely fast, which theoretically generates stable artificial wormhole along the axis of the spin with an opening small enough to fire, say, an x-ray laser through. A signal sent through such a wormhole and then back again could lead to extremely clear-cut violations of causality.
Thus, if the Novikov Self-Consistency Conjecture is correct, the discovery of anything capable of allowing us to engage in large scale gravity manipulation of this sort might well have zero probability of ever occurring.
I don't really believe this is what's going onhere , but given the abject failure of every experiment that might lead us to real, large-scale gravity manipulation (I'm thinking of that experiment where extremely fine measurements of lasers fired down long tubes buried under the ground were supposed to be used to detect gravity waves), it's a neat idea.
--Ryvar
If this is true. can someone point the Higgs Boson to my website? I should be earning megabucks by now. http://www.blackholebunker.com/ for all your Black Hole and other Cosmic Anomaly protection needs
If people could travel in time, the universe would become unstable. People would keep going back and changing history which would result in those same people not going back and changing history ...
If the universe is going to be stable (which it seems to be) in the face of time travel (by particles or people) there must be a mechanism that keeps it stable. If it looks to us like the Boson going back and sabotaging the LHC ...
Well, there is a theory of spacetime that everything that has or will or is happening exists simultaneously. So time paradoxes are impossible.
So, we may have discovered the Higgs boson, and then "nature" undid the discovery afterwards, by stopping it from being discovered in the first place. We'd never "know" that the Higgs boson had been discovered, but it WAS discovered. We just don't have access to that event in spacetime.
Yeah, it's nutty. But the physics all work out.
God.print(9 / 0);
Table-ized A.I.
This post will enlighten you into the inner minds of a regular Slashdot reader. By the end of this post you will know everything.
So here's the deal...
Wait, you look like me. Is that a gun? No! Let me finish typ
Time does not exist in corporeal reality. It only exists in concept as a tool to methodically track and gauge the progression of the state of matter/energy.
Math is a concept, abstract, invention of the mind. Likewise so is Time.
It has been the here and now since the beginning of "time". All that has changed, is state of the matter in our observable vicinities!
There is no grandfather clock with a massive pendulum swinging in the heavens declaring every second that has been, is now, or yet to come.
The earth is not the center of the universe. You can't travel back in time and create paradoxes anymore than a hydrogen atom can. The Higgs boson isn't hiding from you and your macroscopic view. You're not special.
Either I'm missing something, or the level of arrogance in this 'theory' is exceptionally high.
The theory may be silly, and currently it appears to violate Occam's razor. It's pretty implausible for now. But, what if every time they try to discover the Higg's Boson, an even unlikelier mishap prevents them? Janitors tripping over power cords, meteors, lightning strikes, structural collapse...
He also says:
Admittedly, I haven't read the whole series of papers, which means my comments should be taken with a grain of salt, but I did skim, and the authors do make an argument for why a new unknown particle (they use Higgs as their poster boy for unknown theoretical particle) can do this and not the ones we know about, based on the experimental evidence we have on the known particles and the existence of yet another theoretically possible but experimentally undetected (not without trying) phenomenon, a magnetic monopole.
Aside from its hideous verbosity, this made me curious because there was an article a day or two about magnetic monopoles...
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
I don't get it, can you give me a cars' analogy?
Imagine you just got your dream car.
Everytime you try to go on a drive with it, something happens to it.
The kids poked the wheels, a meteor fell trough the engine compartment, the steering wheel just fell of...
The "theory" of Nielsen and Ninomiya is complete nonsense. Read this and this for more information about these crackpots.
I'm roughly aware of what you are writing. But supposing that there is some validity in those theories, what I'm protesting is not the theories themselves but many peoples supposition that they must lead to suspicious events such as meteorite strikes on the LHC etc. Using the principle of Occam's razor it seems more logical to me to think for instance: A, each time some effect manifests itself it will be in roughly the same way and B, the effect will be something much simpler than a meteor strike, e.g. we may discover that in circumstances that should produce a Boson by other theories there actually arises a strange field of some previously unknown kind that makes the creation impossible. That's simpler than trying to explain how a meteor suddenly smashed up the LHC.
Albeit not as much fun.
If Higgs Boson makes time loops that get solved when something break and then is not discovered, really weird things could happen to end those loops (i.e. in FAQ about time travel there were giant ants, and in PKDick's Medler were intelligent killer butterflies). That so far has been just somewhat minor problems that affected only the LHC, but next try could happen something that ends civilization, life on earth or the entire universe.
What many people do not realize, is that the cubs that won in 1908 were a completely different team playing in a different field. Wrigely field ( then called wigman park) was built for the Chicago Whales. The whales kicked but winning two championships at the same ballpark that the Cubs suck in. So yadda yadda yadda. Federal league goes kaput, the whales owner buys the cubs, just changes the name of the whales to the cubs and presto chango they never win again.
The obvious problem is that aliens can no longer communicate with the chicago whales. And thus are cursing them from space. Manipulating the flights of balls. Temporary blinding out fielders. Not even the Modern steroids coursing through Sosa's veins were a match for the alien interlopers.
So we need to go back, BACK into the past and rescue the chicago whales and bring them into the modern era where they can successfully communicate with the pissed aliens and allow the Cubs to win or lose as their abilities permit.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
That says more about American Baseball supporters than it does about Steve's actions.
Observed classical physics corresponds to the highest-probability paths for the wave functions of the particles under consideration; these correspond to the extremal values for an integral of a particular function (related to the classical action) along the path---assuming that extremum is a minimum, it means that all other paths give a result for that path-integral that's higher than that. Paths with higher values are _less_ likely, though not impossible if those values are finite.
The path-integral along a given path is exactly that: it is characteristic of the path as a whole. I believe that they are saying that all paths which include a universal state corresponding to any Higgs boson's being observed produce an effectively infinite path integral; my guess (not having read them yet) is that they claim that such a state makes the canonically real action acquire an imaginary component.
To make a rough analogy: even though there are very many possible air routes from Paris to New York, probably chosen to maximise total profit (say) by minimising fuel usage, or maximising the number of passengers by picking up some in London. So some likely paths are a single arc, Paris to New York, another includes London---a third includes a stop in Iceland to pick up the eccentric billionaire who'll pay $10^6 for the lulz....but none of them include Proxima Centauri. No signal is being sent back in time from New York telling the pilot not to go to Centauri, there is just no world in which she even tries to go there---an 'air route' must have air. (This also conveniently leaves more bandwidth for the Illuminati to send their usual backwards-in-time instructions from New York.)-
(The preceding does not represent an endorsement of the validity of their conclusion, I just don't want to see what is being contended mischaracterised.)
The best part about that site is that they have an RSS feed, so you don't need to remember to check back regularly.
Idiots. Sure, it sucked, but your team losing should not be an excuse to want to inflict grevious harm upon another human being.
Idiots.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
Nothing against theories. Even the wild ones. But bring verifiable predictions, or stop acting as if it were a real theory. It's just an idea. And a pretty bad one to start with.
Mainly because, of all the stupid time travel models that were made up in movies, it is based on the by far stupidest. The one where you can cause time paradoxes, and there is somehow just one time line.
If there were some influence trough time, then that would mean the creation of new time lines. Just like you could kill your father and still live. Because you still came out of the time line where your father lived. You just could never return to it, but only to the newly created one(s), where your father would not exist anymore. Simple. Paradox-free.
But that would destroy the theory. ^^
And I am willing to bet any money you and I have, that they *will* be able to perform the proper experiments. In fact, I am willing to bet all I own, including my life and body on it. Go on. Bet against me. :)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
And my brother still insists, that we are not evolving backwards...
Shit, I would not even blink with an eye, to burn up every single one of those drooling retards that would want to hurt him for this. Were are we? in the dark ages??
That's what reverse natural selection — the fostering and supporting of the worst parts of society, while insulting and mistreating the best from the very beginning of education — does for you.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
...but I don't think the point was that a sentient universe was specifically reaching backward in time to mess with Higgs producing devices.
I read the article, but I don't have it handy right now, but here's what I thought it was really suggesting:
The universe abhors Higgs particles, not on a conscious level, but in the same way nature abhors a vacuum. The production of a Higgs particle is so catastrophic though, that it effectively causes the end of the universe. BUT, if new universes are actually spawned every time a decision state is reached, it follows that some number of those universes will produce a string of events, however unlikely, that precludes the creation of a Higgs particle. Magnets break, parts shipments are stolen, terrorist attacks at the facility that intends to create them, whatever. From our point of view, we will always be in the universe where the thing didn't work, because in the other bubble universes there are no observers left to see the outcome. Why is it "us" that are in the universe(es) that survived? Because we're still here.
I don't think they were suggesting that a "caring universe" is saving us from ourselves, or even saving itself from us. If you accept the possibility of bubble universes it's inevitable that there will be surviving universes where the catastrophic event didn't occur, and we'll always end up being in one of the "lucky ones", because if we weren't we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Some bring out the best in others, some the worst. Some bring out far more.
The Higgs Boson is a theoretical particle. We have no way of knowing whether it exists at all. The LHC might find it, but only if it exists to be found. What if the theory that predicted it is wrong ? I can devise a theory that deposits $100M in my bank account. When it doesn't happen, is that because the universe is somehow conspiring against me ?
On a related note, regarding dark matter/ dark energy - if quantum uncertainty is true, and a particle is never actually in existence in a certain place until you observe it, wouldn't that account for the "missing" matter / energy ? Because it actually "exists" in all dimensions at once, maybe the combined effect would explain the discrepancy we think we have found. I don't actually believe the basis for the dark matter theory anyway. Noticing that a galaxy's rotation is uniform from the centre to the edge is odd, but why would dark matter help ? Why does the solar system not act the same ? It was the application of the solar gravitational model to galaxies that brought the subject up in the first place. Maybe the discrepancy is due to the solar system not being centred around a super massive black hole. Of course the models will be different. And the fact that spiral galaxies exist surely shows that the "arms" have travelled slower than the centre at some stage. Maybe the rotation at the centre has slowed down to match that of the arms, making us think we need extra matter to account for the observation.
Questions, questions.
And tell me one more time how I'm supposed to believe the Scientists *instead* of the Bible, because the scientist have a better track record again? Weren't they just last week talking about how dark matter estimations were off by like 4x?
Well seeing how I must have skipped over the part of the Bible that dealt with the Higgs Boson and dark matter (kind of like how Christians skipped over some parts of Leviticus), I would assume that believing both scientists and the Bible is a possibility in some areas.
Now if you want to argue about carbon dating versus God's sporadic testing of faith (I think I've failed), I can see where you might have to choose one side or the other.
The idea is to conduct some random event, say 1,000 coin tosses, and pre-commit to cancel the LHC if we observe a ridiculous outcome, like 1,000 heads in a row.
...that the arXiv is not a peer-reviewed journal. The article that started this has not survived peer-review and is not reflective of the opinions of every physicist on the planet. If you read the article it's also clear that the author is only being half-serious about the whole thing and his collaborators have left their names off the paper.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
So it's an american car?
I need to go make some t-shirts...
So what does a coach being murdered say about cricket supporters? Or the countless riots over soccer/football games?
Of course, it was not Steve Bartman that caused the cubs to lose that day. It was Alex Gozalez's inability to field a routine ground ball later in the innning.
As long as we are time travelling, we may as well get the history right.
Not to sound like a sissy, but can we shut this thing off and not mess with it? I've played enough Half Life and Doom, seen enough movies, and read enough sci-fi to know that we really shouldn't mess with crazy particle accelerator devices. Seriously, some of the elite physicists in the world are saying that the particles are communicating through time to ensure we don't do what this thing was designed to do? Is this REALLY a good idea?
I don't know about your unified field theory, but mine predicts there is no Higgs particle. The standard model works so long as no particle has mass. That is silly. To get around the problem, there is the Higgs mechanism. The standard model + the Higgs mechanism says not a thing about gravity. Oops.
Why I do is rewrite the Maxwell action using quaternions. The scalar is exactly the same as the tensor approach, B^2 - E^2. Because I am using quaternions which can form products (unlike tensors), I can represent SU(2) - also know as the unit quaternions with quaternions (duh). It is a simple exercise to write the gauge invariant action with all the symmetries of the standard model (U(1), SU(2), and SU(3)).
To get to gravity, switch out the rules of multiplication. These types of numbers are known as hypercomplex numbers, and are even less popular that quaternions. Crank through Euler-Langrange, and out pops the field equations which in the static case is Newton's law.
What is particularly fun is that one can combine the gauge-invariant Maxwell action with the gauge-invariant relativistic gravity action in a way where both of the field strength tensors are gauge-dependent, but those cancel each other out, leaving the action gauge-invariant. It is all up on YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrVW4QG8ei4 for a talk I gave last weekend at an APS meeting.
Doug
Working on new views of old physics at http://VisualPhysics.org
So. Higgs-Boson, testable. Chicago Cubs, detestable. Makes sense to me, but only if you simultaneously answer the seemingly unentangled questions "testable by what" and "detestable to whom" since if there IS a God particle it seems likely that it plays some other game. We posit, then, that if Death plays chess, God must play solitaire.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
My favorite part is the code:
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
document.write("NO");
} catch(err) {
document.write("YES");
}
</script>
So what kind of car would the LHC be?
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
Not a lot actually, given he was found to have died of natural causes.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Woolmer
Criket fans are sophisticated and civilsed individuals (Apart form the Kiwi's).
You wouldnt understand.
> Exactly in line with their argument, I could say that Nature abhors the Chicago Cubs
I thought that was already a given.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Criket fans are sophisticated and civilsed individuals (Apart form the Kiwi's).
As a Kiwi who's not a cricket fan, I'm not sure whether to take offence to that or not.
So what does a coach being murdered [nytimes.com] say about cricket supporters?
That some pathologist didn't do a very good job, and that somehow the supporters are at fault?
Or the countless riots over soccer/football games?
That soccer fans tend to be hooligans (more specifically the British ones).
I'm not quite sure how you can compare the death of a coach and countless riots performed by a large number of people to having one guy blamed for trying to catch a ball that had already entered the bleachers, considering that if he hadn't touched it, Alou might have been able to catch it, thus giving the Cubs the opportunity to get four more outs before relinquishing the lead they currently held due to a series of other plays unrelated to Steve.
Your not sure whether to take offence?
Are you SURE you are a Kiwi!
Taking offence is what they do best generally.
So apart form your disability(Not being a cricket fan)do you get on well with other Kiwi's?
(-:
So apart form your disability(Not being a cricket fan)do you get on well with other Kiwi's?
Not particularly, I was evicted to Australia about 8 months ago.
So were you on Survior NZ eh?
And I thought being evicted was a BAD thing!
Welcome to civilisation! (-:
Note: In a show of tolerance I havent mentioned sheep even ONCE!
Welcome to civilisation! (-:
You mean where many shops (mostly food related) don't support EFTPOS and I have to regress back to carrying cash everywhere? Where my power gets cut off for 3 weeks because when we requested the name be changed on the account they thought it meant "please disconnect me, I don't like electricity"? Where my ISP tells me to contact my modem provider and my modem provider tells me to contact my ISP because the two aren't compatible with each other (and most other ISPs don't service the exchange)? I'm not sure I like civilisation, give me grass skirts any day :(
Note: In a show of tolerance I havent mentioned sheep even ONCE!
Note: The tolerance seems to have expired ;)
I don't get the obsession with the sheep jokes. There are more sheep in Australia than in New Zealand.
Um... four corner simultaneous 4-day time cube in only 24 hour rotation?
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
I feel a bit remiss in this summary. I had submitted the stuff, but later that day, it struck me that the way I presented it was approaching slanderous (basically very strongly dismissing the original premise) and hoped that the summary wasn't posted. Slashdot editor kdawson took pity on me and re-worded; and frankly I'm grateful for it. My guess is that in re-wording, some was lost in the translation.
Greg
If you read Nielsen's page, he's interested in the possibility that the physical laws might be so enormously complex that they would appear random, but they are such that in the limit they appear to conform to the familiar ones we know. So I don't think this is time travel, but more like, the physical laws of the universe ALWAYS WERE such that Higgs Bosons are not created. Nothing 'reached back in time' to perturb the minds of the Congresspeople into Scuttling the Superconducting Supercollider. The laws of the universe are just such that the minds of the Congresspeople were perturbed when they had to be in order to scuttle the SSC.
Possibly different physical laws ( which have not changed ) caused the LHC to have problems.
Of course this is only what I think the argument is. I have no idea if A) I am right in my interpretation, or B) if the argument holds water. But it is interesting.
This page was linked to from Holger Nielsen's web page
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