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Large Hadron Collider is a Time Machine?
MistrX writes "If the latest theory of Tom Weiler and Chui Man Ho is right, the Large Hadron Collider – the world's largest atom smasher that started regular operation last year – could be the first machine capable causing matter to travel backwards in time."
So, when it did already cause matter to have appeared?
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
Ha! Beat that!
so that what triggering the earthquakes now days under ground time travel.
I put my large hardon into a large hardon collider.
I wish I could go back in time, so as to not make that mistake again. Ouch!
the article claims the theory avoids paradox but in the same breath proposes that messages could be sent to the past...
FTFA:
"Because time travel is limited to these special particles, it is not possible for a man to travel back in time and murder one of his parents before he himself is born, for example. However, if scientists could control the production of Higgs singlets, they might be able to send messages to the past or future."
Send a message to a hitman saying "kill X and I will send you the results of any race horse of your choice". How's that for not being able to go back and kill your grandfather?
So who is this Higgs bozo and how in hell's name did he lose his singlet yesterday before he even got it?
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Am I the only one who gets absolutely frustrated that people are still proposing the possibility of time-travel?
This is why I can't party with my theoretical physicist friends anymore.
otherwise we'd have gotten a message indicating that it works
if all this crap would be possible in practice, someone would have used it and we would know it allready. razored.
If they could send messages to the past, doesn't that mean their theory is wrong since they haven't received a message yet?
It read "Time travel is impossible or we would have already sent you a message, moron".
Am I the only one who read that as Large Hardon Collider is a Time Machine?
Who are the people who made out like bandits in the 2008 crash?
Ah, a headline that is a question. Classic Cavuto move.
Can't remember who said this...
"If the answer to your headline can be summarized as 'No', then don't print it."
-d
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
no. can't happen. we don't have a machine for that, nor does it meet our georgiastonemason 'math' parameters. so disappear.
ALL MOMMYS, GET YOUR BUTTS TO MIDDLE EAST, ONT, JAPAN, DC, LA, NY, FL ETC..., WE'RE DYING HERE.
...it was only a matter of time.
Sigh.... I do LIKE imaginative thinking. Something that is lost with most scientists... but please be careful with what you say.
Time is one of the LEAST understood concepts. I think we've let science fiction be our guide on our understanding of time.... and... cough... I think it's "time" for that to stop.
Just wait until yesterday, it will have been!
Everything you know is wrong, Just forget the words and sing along.
Is it really so difficult to get the atoms up to 88 miles per hour?
This game will waste your life. Don't clicky!
You're remembering the future.
The 'time machines' that physicists say are 'possible' can only go back as far as the creation of the time machine itself. You can't go back to 1937 to warn people that the Hindenburg is gonna burn, nor back to 1963 and take out the gunman on the grassy knoll.
Anyone know of any Sci-Fi where people are freely able to send messages across time? It would require a multiverse to avoid violating causality, similar to the John Titor story, and it would be impossible to send messages to any time before the machine was powered on. Imagine if you could email yourself or others across time by relaying an email through a "temporal router." What a crazy world that would be.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The only question is the bandwidth, and how many people have access to the channel. See here.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
The answer to your question is 42 ..
"One of the attractive things about this approach to time travel is that it avoids all the big paradoxes," Weiler said. "Because time travel is limited to these special particles, it is not possible for a man to travel back in time and murder one of his parents before he himself is born, for example. However, if scientists could control the production of Higgs singlets, they might be able to send messages to the past or future."
How does this avoid paradoxes? A scientist sends a message back in time "Kill my father". Past performs the deed. Paradox opened.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
Ain't possible.
It may produce events that represent possible/probable past events. A representation of past events is not TimeTravel.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
I'm seriously disappointed in all of you.
hmm
I've been wondering this for a long time as well.
It seems to stand to reason that *if* this actually happens and *if* you are able to detect these, the best time frame to look for them is from the moment the collision becomes unavoidable until the actual collision occurs. This is of course a very short time.
IF particles can travel further back than that, I will be able to predict the collision with 100% certainty when I shouldn't be able to and thus can "predict the future" which is illogical.
IANA particle physicist.
The article says:
They did indeed post it in 2007. But where was the buzz generated? As far as I can tell, that paper has never been cited, not even in another arXiv preprint. I can't even find evidence of it being discussed on mailing lists or blogs, at least anything Google knows about, prior to the current bit of publicity due to this article. Did it generate a bunch of hallway buzz that never made it onto the internet in any form?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The LHC hits atoms so hard that it knocks them into next week!
Time travel and CERN's LHC, but no mention of John Titor?
Wake me when the headlines read "LHC researcher wins multiple lotteries".
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Be a real man, woman, or pre-op tranny and buy the "No Stinkin Higgs" t-shirt (http://bit.ly/GEMtshirt) that predicts, well, that they will not find the Higgs or some time-traveling singlet.
Doug
http://visualphysics.org
Working on new views of old physics at http://VisualPhysics.org
I read "results of the race horse" as how the horse would do in all its coming races. It won't help you place a trifecta wager, but it will help you know when to bet on that horse to win, place, or show in its next races.
With the LHC having still not reached the energies it's designed for, methinks this is overcompensation, self-aggrandizement when faced with humiliation.
Communication and computational device for transmitting data faster than data is generated.
At first read I thought that said . . Hard on. .. The the first post. .. Testicl...
What's the point of Mod points over a long weekend?
There is an aspect which I am curious about:
carrying information.
I have understood in some of the screwing-around-with-the-speed-of-light research that while they can make signals look like they are departing from the C speed limit, it turns out that no information is transferable in these unusual cases. (EG - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light#Phase_velocities_above_c )
The differentiation between a headline saying 'X is faster than light!!1!' and info about actual signal transfer can be non-intuitive, so I have to wonder: Is the transfer of information necessarily implied by the proposal here?
-- "Oh. This guy again."
Are there some races in which you can bet the finishing position of any horse, not just bet on the winner?
Wouldn't a more likely way of doing it be accusing the person of some huge crime? Get the person locked up, never meets destined significant other. Bam paradox. Better yet, do it with countries for world scale fun! Time traveling wikileaks could be interesting...
There is no future the Haydron exploded causing a black hole that ate the earth. Qed no messages.
Am I the only one who gets absolutely frustrated that people are still proposing the possibility of time-travel?
You probably feel the same way as Otto did, when Miller was trying to explain it to him.
Just wait till someone with enough money decides that would be profitable to invest on building such machines to know how high will be stock market next week.
I have held a theory since grade 6 that time travel is science fiction extreme. A lot of geeks and nerds including these two at the LHC will put forward theories as to why it could happen, but there is one guiding principle I have that assures me that it will not.
If it could happen, it will have already happened years from now, therefore it can't happen. The possibility of time travel predisposes the universe to the after effects of said time travel, and since there is no data to show that any after effects have occurred in any way, ever, then no one 6 billion years from now is time travelling.
I do not have any religious faith, as that is simply preposterous and absurd. I don't believe in ghosts, and I do not believe that Aliens come all the way to earth to probe the anus' of our trailer dwelling class of humanity. I also do not believe that time travel will ever be a reality.
now you can carry on arguing over the details and the definition of time travel, that is not the same thing as actually achieving time travel as we all know of it to be thought of. I will leave on a resounding of my keynote:
If it could happen, it will have already happened years from now.
Yes. All of them.
I want to shoot the messenger!
I thought so. So that pretty much answers the question... if you had some way of knowing that the horse is finishing 3rd in this race, you just place your bet on that.
In either "leg" of the universe, however, causality is intact. In one, you send a message "to the past" that seems to never have been received or acted upon, and in the other, some loony kills a guy and says he was told to by space aliens from the future who turn out to never have existed, or sent any message.
In the second option, someone receives a message that is never sent. How do you figure that causality is intact? Because other people won't believe that he received the message, he never did? If a tree falls in the forest and only one person saw it, the tree never fell down?
Don't you think the first thing you would do is send a message to yourself to prove it works? As such, one wouldn't have to hypothesize as one would have proof. In fact, you'd probably just sent the formula for how to do it back in time removing all speculation. Full of Shiiiiiiiit.
all i say is .... Prove it. ...
it *may* also taste of toffee cheezecake
If the past can't be changed, you can have causal loops (self-causing events) but those aren't inconsistent like paradoxes. And that's ignoring the many-worlds resolution.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
...a message proves that it is either impossible or that their are infinite timelines.
ceci n'est pas un sig
A paradox doesn't have to involve killing your grandfather.
If I use the ability to send messages to the past, then should I be careful and not try to send myself lottery numbers that nobody won? I suspect I would be run down by a car before I had a chance to put in those numbers for a ticket.
It would probably be safer to send back numbers to a lottery that was won by only one person, and that person was me! However, this means that I would have the ability to get the winning ticket before I sent the information back in time. What would happen if I decided not to send the information back after I won? This could lead to an experiment of "free will" versus "determinism"!
Another application of the technology would be to create an infinitely fast computer. It can send back data from intermediate steps and loop chronologically. This would make it infinitely fast and would save a lot of energy. I'm not sure if it is fair to save that much energy before it's considered cheating "the law of conservation of energy". Is there a minimum amount of energy required to calculate a result? Also, in a chronologically loop, how many times did the computer send information back in time, once?
Where did that picture get taken that's in the article??? At the local strip mall? They need to go back in time and alter the decision to print that.
But how does the transmission of information or particles work exactly? Are we taking today's particles and pushing them back in time (and if so, where?), or are we taking particles from the future and making them appear to us now in our present? Both approaches technically meet the definition of "sending particles back in time", but any practical use of this technology will depend on how this process works.
Our universe contains some quantity of information. Let's call that quantity (x).
Now, some information comes from the future at the LHC. Our universe now contains more information than it did before. Let's call that quantity (x)+n
Finally, the moment that extra information came from arrives. Now our universe contains (x+n)-n, or x amount of information again - but for that brief period, our universe contained more information. Was information created and subsequently destroyed?
Because you've all overlooked the fact that not only will the LHC destroy the earch, it will have done it before any of you ever existed. No use arguing. Your non existent rhetoric amuses me...if I were here to read it.
What's up with this box everyone has to think inside of or outside of? Why does there have to be a box?
what
I can believe it. It certainly looks like Tom Weiler has traveled back in time, seeing that sweater tied around his neck.
Proverbs 21:19
About sending information back in time...
To paraphrase Fermi,
If this theory is true, why haven't we done so already?
Has it been already seven days? Quick, find Frank Parker and send him to the plant.
Someone is tinkering with the timeline. And it's someone from a period +- 50 yrs Current time. They're trying to produce outcomes that bear on our current geopolitical status. There are changes embedded in ancient periods:
The mother culture of Central America:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2001/caraltrans.shtml
Massive civilization in Amazonian Basin:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/11/081119-lost-cities-amazon.html
There are better-known examples closer to Europe, and more modern: the Antikythera mechanism or the batteries of Sumer, the Jacquard loom or the automata of Rhodes or China:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automaton
All of these happened. They are indisputable fact. Yet, they have not disrupted the general sweep of accepted history. For example, if the mother culture of the Central and South American cultures the Spanish encountered, namely the Maya, Aztec, and Inca, far pre-dated even the Egyptians, then why did the peoples of the New World not stand on par with those of the Old? If the Amazonian basin sported a sophisticated culture of millions of people far before the same was achieved by Rome, then why do we scarcely know about them today?
Closer to home, meaning the here and the now, we have attempts to introduce advanced technology far prior to their realization now. Yet, they have not changed the here and the now. Rather, they remain outliers.
Certain parties have tried to alter the timeline. But they've done so in scattershot fashion, trying to get history to pivot on a dime by introducing innovations before their time or deeper, longer term ploys to get the engine of history moving in a different direction earlier (ie. Ecuador or Brazil). If they had succeeded, then we would not now know the difference. It would simply be as it has always been. There would be no alternate outcomes.
That there is a disparity suggests that the timeline is a massively multi-variate system whose movements defy simple interpretations or solutions. Kill Hitler and WWII and the Holocaust would never have happened? Well, the disparity suggests it may have changed the timing, but that one event, Hitler's death, may not have avoided the thing altogether. There was much more in play than that one man.
There is a lot more than a /. post can accommodate, but it's something to consider. There have been many revelations of late, but none have changed the narrative.
Why?
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Someone is bugging around sent those posts to the past just to mock on dupe post complainers
Akin to medeival theologians debating about the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin. As it's framed, it's not falsifiable, thus putting it in the same category as unicorns, the easter bunny, and suchlike.
HOW IS BABBY FORMED?
Maybe that's why the planet is getting all upset - a 2m continent shift isn't peanuts.
The parent just said, essentially, "I don't think time travel is possible, and all right-thinking people should agree with me, though I won't offer a concrete reason for my position." When I point out that just a blanket "I don't think something is possible" isn't an argument, it gets modded offtopic? Really?
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
winning super lotto numbers would be easier to send and cause a larger ripple.
Winner X now has to share winnings with false winner Y, money used will not go the same paths and changes will ripple out. Winner Y's changes would have never happened and ripple could be HUGE if the money was used to change a dramatic event, or tiny if the money was used to buy massive amounts of coke and hookers.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Though if enough people used it to sell Delorean stock short that could (have) affect(ed) the company's operations... hmm....
Most people don't seem to get it. If you can send even a small amount of information back a short time, you can't have your Grandfather killed, but you can build a computer that can solve an infinite loop in constant time.
N != NP isn't important anymore. Your salesman can run *all* the paths around the cities and remember the shortest. Just about any encryption that isn't one time pad can be broken.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
this is wild, i had started to outline the premise of a scifi story modeled after neuromancer, where a hacker hacks in the LHC and reverse engineers a program in to the LHC to send messages to himself in the past.
he then uses these messages for financial and political gain as well as to cover up for himself when others get to close to what he knows.
"Large Hadron Collider is a Time Machine?"
If so, that's an awful expensive clock.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
The Future: A first post, stamping on an article, forever.
Disclaimer: MINAA (Mummy! I'm Not An Animal!)
it's a good thing grant money isn't related to moronic headline grabbing ability ... oh wait.
PS let's just add another dimension so the theory will work... FFS...
PS "You may be able to send messages but you wouldn't be able to go back and change the past" erm FAIL.
Anyway I think it is so nice these guys get paid to sit around and fantasise all day
It can only really be considered a time machine if it can be applied both ways, if it is able to send stuff back in time,then it is stuck there, because no way of pushing stuff forward in time, I would say, no yet jimmy, not yet.
Time machine? Maybe. How about powerful enough to start messing with tectonic plates.
Interesting. The space occupied by the LHC one minute in the future must be pretty far off given the speed at which the Earth travels in space. Those Higgs singlets of tomorrow will have to be pretty smart and good space travelers to locate themselves in the LHC today. I think the movement of the planet in space is also a response to why a man won't be able to travel back to murder his parents or himself. That travel would need to be executed in both space and time and for now we can't move that fast in space.
My understanding is that this is a theory and one of the 2 authors qualifies it as "long shot". So probably the best answer to the title of this post is : "?". Unless the title poses a rhetorical question, case in which the best answer is "," .
Nah.
Causality -- it's the law, bitches! Simply put, any phenomena that allows an effect to occur in time before it's cause violates my Buddhist faith as well as my understanding of Physics. I believe (and hope) it may be possible for information to travel faster than light, but information traveling backwards in time really messes up the universe.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
... Our universe now contains more information than it did before
....Was information created and subsequently destroyed?
If these particles move through time, what does it actually mean for them to be in our universe at time t ? As for the information, I didn't read anything about how the sending/receiving information from these time traveling particles affects the current amount of information in our universe. Perhaps there is only an exchange of information between the two different times using this hypothetical particle as the conduit.
As others have noted, I personally don't see how sending information vs. sending a person avoids any paradoxes. Any solution for one would seem to be a solution for explaining paradoxes of the other.
I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it. -- Groucho Marx
FTA: "However, if scientists could control the production of Higgs singlets, they might be able to send messages to the past or future." If this was or will be possible, you would think physicists would have got a message by now?
Didn't we already get this story next year?
The Higg's field will not exist until the LHC discovers (creates) the Higg's particle. The function of the Higg's field is to create and destroy the universe. Immediately after its creation, the Higg's field will expand to the size of the universe, representing a force which will strip the characteristics from the elementary particles, leaving a universe which is super symmetric, has zero entropy, and is timeless. The field will then cool and undergo a phase change which will restore the characteristics to the particles and the new universe will be reborn. Since the initial conditions will be the same each time this happens, the resulting universe will unfold exactly as this one did, right down to your lack of shoelaces.
- except for those cheaters.
If they discover the decay products spontaneously, and stopped all tests, wouldn't they not detect the decay particles because the singlet didn't end up being created?
It was a recurring dream actually. And strangely enough....this dream was also shared by some of my colleagues. It was difficult to make out at first, but after a while the dream became increasingly lucid. But in the end, all I could really make out was the front of a church and a voice saying "this is not dream" and "you are receiving this broadcast in order to alter the events you are seeing". There was also something about "one nine nine nine". Oh yeah, there was also a scary dude in the doorway.
gno-teckst.
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Time does not exist. It is merely a measurement of experience.
Meters do not exist. They are merely a measurement of distance.
Can you slow down time?
Yes. Experience time faster.
Can you speed up time?
Yes. Experience time slower.
Can you stop time?
To an infinitesimal limit, as long as your experience of time is infinitely high.
Can you go back in time?
Yes. Forget what you have experienced.
Can you go forward in time?
To an limit, as long as your experience of time is infinitely slow, allowing you to pop up wherever you want in your experiences.
As for this silly little particle. For it, time works like a force. The net force must be zero, so every action must have an equal and opposite reaction. This applies to any object, including a human who wants to time travel.
Can it go faster in time?
Only if it makes everything else experience time slower.
Can it go slower in time?
Only if it makes everything else experience time faster.
Can it stop time?
To a limit. As long as everything else experiences time infinitely faster.
Can it go infinitely fast?
To a limit. As long as everything else experiences time infinitely slower.
Can it go back in time?
Only if it makes the rest of the world forget that it has moved, and make every single particle return as if it never existed, popping up in an earlier point in time.
Can it go forward in time?
To a limit. As long as everything else experiences time infinitely slower, popping up at whatever points it needs to.
Paradoxes are paradoxes for a reason. They are paradoxes because they are simply not possible.
Can you go back in time and kill your grandfather?
Actually, yes, you can.
Will it be a paradox?
No. Because if the grandfather had a child, it would not be you. It would be another child that is very similar to you. Even if you revert every single process, popping up in the air, making the rest of the world forget and every particle forget, no net time has passed, because it does not really exist. You were still born when you were born. Everything still happens.
If you kill your grandfather, your father still existed. He just won't exist AGAIN. It just makes you a murderer.
Even if you decide to kill your younger self:
Yes, you used a time machine that you built. Yes, the person you are going to kill will most likely eventually build a time machine if nothing stops him. But that doesn't mean you never built a time machine. You did. Even though he looks like you, acts like you, and is the same as you in every way, he is not you.
Think of it like a car.
Can a car go forward?
Sure.
Can it go backward?
Sure.
Can it curve off of a path and then go back at an earlier point on the road, speed up, and rear-end itself?
No. Because there is only one car.
Similarly, there is only one particle, and there is only one time traveler.
Sure, if they make the world forget and every other particle revert, it can seemingly pop up back in time, but the particle just like it is not it. It is only similar.
And that's time travel in a nutshell.
You saw me at the party, but just moments before the party I was seen in my Attic folding underwear and checking my heat diffusers leading to the basement so the building structure is temperately habitable throughout.
You see, I was at two places but now I'm typing this on Slashdot. The more appearances I make, the more history proves I'm right.
Part of the problem comes for humanity's capacity for metaphor. Time is lumped together with space as "spacetime", and mathematical models turn time into a dimension, with descriptions of "light cones" and other theoretical constructs that, while useful for purposes of illustration, ultimately lead us down thought-experiment rabbit holes.
Time is simply our perception of the rate at which things change. There is no past, there is no future. There is only now, the point at which change occurs. Time "travel" is thus a silly concept -- there's no "when" to go but now.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
They've made that earthquake in japan!
xD
Here is more general paradox of time travelling than I met before. Consider someone who clearly remembers that he didn't receive any messages from the future in 2000 year, i. e. the universe in 2000 year doesn't have an event of receiving a message from the future. Now he invents time messenger and sends the message to himself in 2000 year. That makes a universe in 2000 year having the message from the future. So in 2000 year the universe has message from the future and doesn't at the same time. Impossible. This applies to any influences to the past.
Moving matter back in time is so passé.
Will it fit inside a Delorean?
The day Microsoft creates a product that doesn't suck, it will be known as the Microsoft Vaccuum Cleaner!
My problem with time travel is that people arriving in the time and space, are like creating matter/enegy. If conservation of eergy is true, then you should be able to add up all the energy in the universe and call it e1, then convert all the matter into energy and call it e2. Add that together to get e(t). I believe me(t) should remain constant, and objects arriving (or leaving) throw that off.
Dear Descendant,
Please send me an email from the future describing how I can solve my current financial distress.
P.S. I will set up a trust fund for you if you do this.
Regards,
Your Ancestor
Clickety Click
They're waiting Gordon, In the test chamber..
How could universe contain different quantities of information in different moments (without considering time travel) if information can be neither created nor destroyed?
Your assumptions contains contradiction.