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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
so that what triggering the earthquakes now days under ground time travel.
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?
Last post +1
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.
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?
Damn, you were seconds away from getting +5 funny with this one AC
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"
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.
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!
"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?
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!
Wake me when the headlines read "LHC researcher wins multiple lotteries".
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
You mean this one posted 10 minutes before you? Hello McFly!!
Unless it was posted from the future... nevermind...
Ascalante: Your bride is over 3,000 years old.
Kull: She told me she was 19!
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.
http://www.bash.org/?104383
Communication and computational device for transmitting data faster than data is generated.
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?
That is incorrect. Some solutions to General Relativity allow for time loops around massive rotating cylinders. Such cylinders may have been created during the big bang (cosmic strings) and hence might allow travel to any previous time.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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)
By absolute certainty he received the message, guaranteed, 100%. Any recorders in the vicinity would record it. They just wouldn't be able to determine the source. But nothing there would affect the "future self" that sent it because THAT future self never sent it at all. Parallel timelines, to simplify. And thus there's no "global" causality problem, only a "local" one to us 4-dimensional-perception beings. The energy *appears* to come out of nowhere but in fact just comes from somewhere we can't perceive. Similar the energy *appears* to disappear into nowhere from the sender, but in fact it just goes somewhere they can't perceive.
It's origin is extra-universal, in that little scenario, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It just means it originated from another universe and we happened to receive / measure the result. It *doesn't* mean that if the future self from that universe "forgets" to send the message that the universe will implode. Causality is still intact, paradoxes wouldn't happen, and useful communication is effectively zero (which seems to fit nicely with nobody bothering to use it to talk to us yet). It's just not been sent by that universe.
That other universe "sent" some message "somewhere" deliberately. It knows and never expects to see the outcome of that message because it's gone *outside* that universe into something else (even if "outside" refers not to standard four dimensions, hence no worries about speed-of-light and/or energy loss of the universe).
It's about not limiting your perception of causality and potential paradox to four dimensions (one of them "one-way"). Future Self A sent a message from Universe A to Universe B. Guy In Past B in Universe B received it and acted upon it. However Future Self B may not ever exist, or have any knowledge of events. And yet nothing was "broken". Future Self A is pretty much thwarted from using the past to achieve his dastardly end or gain infinite energy or break several billion physical laws (like re-using the same energy, etc. which again fits nicely with how we like the universe to run). And Future Self B, who MIGHT never have been born because of the message, will be completely unaware of it and not obligated to fulfill any paradoxical requirements.
Sucks for Guy In Past B, though, but he's already a bit loopy listening to messages from a stranger in the future.
"Large Hadron Collider is a Time Machine?"
If so, that's an awful expensive clock.
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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.
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.
So you're saying the Japan earthquake is proof that a time machine powerful enough to mess with tectonic plates in the past has been invented in the future? (Damn, it's hard to use the proper tense when discussing this!)
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.
momentum.
it is conserved across all dimensions.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
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."
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
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