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."

Comments

Whoa

[Kell Bengal]

Least coherent summary ever. I read it twice and I'm still not sure I understand what we're talking about.

Re:Whoa

[belthize]

Must be a White Sox fan.

Re:Whoa

[Tubal-Cain]

I think he's talking about a group of people that do something out in the big blue room.

Re:Whoa

[Cryacin]

Least coherent summary ever. I read it twice and I'm still not sure I understand what we're talking about.

That's just because the Higgs Boson was there in the discussion before and after you read it, but not during.

Re:Whoa

[muzicman]

Maybe they are like Gideons?

Do y'all have different books of the Bible than I do? Are y'all Gideons? Who are the ******' Gideons? Ever met one? NO! Ever seen one? NO! But they're all over the ******' world puttin' Bibles in hotel rooms. Every hotel room- "This Bible was placed here by a Gideon" When?! I been here all day. I ain't seen ****! I saw the housekeeper come and go. I saw the minibar guy come and go. I never laid eyes on a ******' Gideon. What are they- ninjas? Where are they? Where're they from? Gidea? What the **** are these people?

I'm gonna capture a Gideon. I'm gonna make that my hobby. I'm gonna call the front desk one day. "Yeah. I don't seem to have a Bible in my room."


God bless you Bill!

Re:Whoa

[thommym]

As we all stem from Africa we then have been without all your wisdom.

Re:Whoa

[mcgrew]

Higgs bosun, my hairy white aging ass. The Cubs could win a world series -- but there's only one group of people who could make it happen. That's the Cubs fans.

My daughter tells me that if I want to see a Cardinals game not only affordably but cheap, wait until the Cardinals play the Reds in Cincinnati and drive there. Seems ticket and beer prices are dirt cheap there. Why? Because people in Cincinnati won't support a bunch of incompetent losers, unlike people in Chicago.

Major league baseball is not a game and not a sport. It's a billion dollar business. If it was a sport, they would not have cancelled the World Series over a strike/lockout when the millionaires fought the billionaires.

The Cubs fans fill those losers' stadiums, drink the overpriced beer, buy the overpriced hats and shirts, and spend spend spend -- on a bunch of LOSERS, the only team in major league baseball ever to go over a century without winning the World Series. Why should the owners shell out dough to field a good team, good coaching staff, and good management when they can rake in billions on a perpetually losing team?

If you Cubs fans want to see your team win the series, you're simply going to have to stop supporting those losers. When the stands are empty like they are in Cincinnati, management will have to lower prices and field a good team, good coaches and good management. When that happens, then you can go back to supporting the former losers.

Just stay away, and they'll eventually win the series.

BTW, GO CARDS! Damn, they didn't even make the playoffs this year =(

Time will tell

[MichaelSmith]

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.

Re:Time will tell

[elrous0]

Obviously the aliens are afraid we'll discover the secret element that makes FTL travel possible. And that could lead us to realize that we've been sitting on a huge mine of it all along, right here on earth--hidden deep in the rectums of rednecks.

Surpisingly many respectible physists talking

[physburn]

Surprisingly many respectable physicists talking, about this dumb nature abores the Higgs theory. You see there all very excited about the relaunch of the LHC, about finally finding the Higgs, super-symmetric particles, or maybe something new, that there hyping it up. They need it to, without a bit of public excitement, the enormous amounts of money needed for each big generation of collider, aren't going to get spent.

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

Re:Surpisingly many respectible physists talking

[AuMatar]

Not strange at all. If they spin it the right way, they can charm the governments and come out on top. Besides when you compare the cost of a new collider to their national bottom lines it just isn't that significant. Sure if they manage to pop up with a new particle or two they can get it quicker, but even without that the knowledge that these particles don't exist means it isn't just money flushed down the drain.

Re:Surpisingly many respectible physists talking

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Surprisingly many respectable physicists talking, about this dumb nature abores the Higgs theory.

Its becoming a hallmark of theoretical physics. Underproducing and over-respected scholars prattling on about any nonsense they can dress up in sophistic argument.

Theoretical physics has produced essentially no results for 40 years. Even when faced with outright contradictions of the standard model, i.e. neutrino mass, they do little but concoct the same convoluted models that lead to nowhere. String theory is the prime example of this, but things like loop quantum gravity and dark matter are no less terminal. For four decades physicists have produced theories that raise only more questions and don't answer anything.

In light of this, it's easy to see why nonsense such as the multi-verse, the anthropic principle, and of course this travesty come out of the mouths of men and women who are tired of seeing their more rigorous efforts achieve little and less. By proposing these theories, they can reach virtually the same results and conclusion they otherwise would (i.e nothing of value), yet need expend only a fraction of the effort. PLus, by dressing it all up even a little, they can wow the odd committee and perhaps get a bit more funding.

Meanwhile, despite the odds against it, science moves on.

Re:Surpisingly many respectible physists talking

[Interoperable]

Surprisingly many respectable physicists talking

Which physicists and who are they talking to? What makes it into the news isn't an accurate representation of the work that's being done by those who work in the field. The small, interesting discoveries don't get reported on by the media; it's the crazy theories and cool ideas that get coverage. I can guarantee you that most of the work work being done at CERN is mind-numbingly boring as far as the general population is concerned, but it's very good work.

Don't mistake entertaining musings and fun thought experiments as being the opinion of the lead researchers. It may be the musings that are reported on but it's the research that runs the accelerator.

Re:Surpisingly many respectible physists talking

[Interoperable]

I mean theoretical results fundamental physics

You continue to confuse high-energy physics as being the only domain of fundamental physics. It isn't.

Compare this to the history of theoretical physics since Newton.

That's 330 years of history. How many "major" advances (by your definition) have occurred since then in total? You don't seem to understand the manner in which science progresses and you seem to want to hold it (or at least particle physics) to a different standard than the rest of intellectual progress.

There can be good work in a field that doesn't change the paradigm; it doesn't imply a "drought". No one has done anything since the 70s. My computer still uses transistors, there is no moon colony, cancer still sucks, my car has an internal combustion engine and seriously, where the hell is my jet pack? It's pointless to use changes in paradigm as a benchmark for advance.

Re:Surpisingly many respectible physists talking

[lennier]

"Theoretical physics has produced essentially no results for 40 years."

Indeed. It's actually rather strange when you step back and look at it.

Newton gave us calculus, mechanics and kick-started the industrial revolution.

Maxwell in the 1860s produced a rich field of practical applications that we're still mining today.

Radioactivity and atomic theory in the late 1800s produced, well, very large bombs and power reactors which don't *always* kill people nastily. And a whole bunch of paradoxical complications which were 'solved' one by one in an ad-hoc manner leading to quantum mechanics.

Special relativity linked Maxwell and Newton and is used in a lot of engineering.

General relativity made gravitational maths vastly harder, predicted Mercury's precession and gravitational lensing (after a bit of fudging of the data), created cosmology which has no practical applications, led to Unified Field theory which... didn't work at all... and.... um. We'll get back to you in a billion years! Because that's the timescales it operates on! But it's useful, honest!

Quantum electrodynamics sorta-kinda linked SR and quantum mechanics, made the behaviour of light darn near impossible to think intuitively about, but seems to have led to useful results in microelectronics.

Quantum chromodynamics.... explains the results of collider experiments.... and.... well, because quarks don't exist unbound, there aren't any practical applications of that knowledge at all. But we need to build bigger colliders to generate more data to hand-tune our theory which explains the results of collider experiments. So we can tune our theory more. It's all useful, honest!

String theory... produces string theory, which produces string theory, which produces books complaining about string theory. It's useful, honest!

Even fun stuff like Bose-Einstein condensates are all using maths which dates back to the 1930s.

Post-1970s *engineering* has done amazing things applying and confirming existing theoretical models. But post-1970s theory doesn't seem to have gone anywhere. Isn't that odd? We had this huge Cambrian explosion in the 1800s to 1930s... then the tap just sort of dried up.

What's disturbing is not that post-1970 theory hasn't seemed to lead us anywhere, but that theoretical consensus has converged more and more on a deep pessimism about seeing any revolutionary changes. In the 1930s, the general air in physics seemed to be 'is your idea crazy enough to be true?' So we got science fiction. Now, it's 'ennh, there's a good reason why for any interesting X, we'll never be able to do that - Einstein/Feynman/Bohr deny it. Gravity control or cold fusion are only for crackpots. But give us billions for a new collider/tokamak anyway, just to prove that we can't do it. And stop bugging us for your jetpack, you'll never understand the maths anyway. Oh, and it's all useful, honest!'

Our best technology showpieces are still 1930s theory with 2000s engineering.

Something is wrong with this picture.

Physicist humor, reporter humor

[lieutenant24]

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!"

Re:Well, duh!

[OrangeTide]

Nature having it out for the Cubbies is at least plausible. The rest of pseudo-science is not.

Re:Oh get real

[pete-classic]

I bet you're a gas at parties.

-Peter

Steve Bartman incident for those who don't know...

[VinylRecords]

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.

magic and time travel

[Odinlake]

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.

Re:magic and time travel

[glwtta]

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.

You clearly have no understanding of theoretical physics. You are probably one of those people who doesn't believe that in the many-worlds interpretation decoherence hinges entirely on human actions, resulting in universes which are primarily distinguished by the clothing and facial hairstyle choices of their respective inhabitants, thus providing material for lazy TV science fiction writers.

Oblig. link

[FooAtWFU]

http://hasthelhcdestroyedtheearthyet.com/

Re:Oblig. link

[CreamyG31337]

YES

Novikov self-consistency

[Ryvar]

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

Re:Novikov self-consistency

[justleavealonemmmkay]

I don't buy it. By your interpretation of the conjecture, the people working at CERN couldn't possibly be born.

You make the fallacious reasoning that if A may lead to and precedes B, B to C, C to D and D to violation of causality, that A cannot possibly happen. This is faulty. Just because you can't have Y without having X and Y is impossible doesn't mean X is impossible.

Re:Oh get real

[Cryacin]

I bet you're a gas at parties.

It all works swimmingly until he pulls out his favourite board game. The game of life insurance.

This post

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:I can't be the only one...

[fractoid]

Erm, it is. He's joking that saying that some spooky future force is preventing us seeing Higgs bosons 'for our own good' is about as scientific as saying that God hates the Chicago Cubs... and that there's as much proof for the latter as for the former.

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...

Re:Analogy?

[mooglez]

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...

Re:Attention Humans

[AJWM]

A universe which permits time travel which can change the past is inherently unstable. Sooner or later (on some meta time axis) that universe's timeline will be changed to one where such time travel never occurs, and will then stay that way. It's the most stable state.

Star Trek IV & The cubs

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

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.

Re:Well

[glwtta]

Yes, very good point. If something really unlikely happens, we should have a good unlikely explanation ready. It's good we are starting now, so we can be ready when something really unlikely happens.