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Large Hadron Collider is a Time Machine?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the summon-michael-j-fox dept.

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."

33 of 332 comments (clear)

  1. Testable! by proverbialcow · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So, when it did already cause matter to have appeared?

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    1. Re:Testable! by proverbialcow · · Score: 2

      ...and why couldn't I go back and not screw up my first-ever first post?

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    2. Re:Testable! by Speare · · Score: 5, Funny

      So, when it did already cause matter to have appeared?

      It wioll haven be appearing again tomorrow, since the test performed yesterday is retroactively rescheduled for next week. Consult http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Dan_Streetmentioner for more grammar tips.

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    3. Re:Testable! by WrongSizeGlass · · Score: 2

      ...and why couldn't I go back and not screw up my first-ever first post?

      Because it's not going to be magic, it's just going to be a time machine.

    4. Re:Testable! by Bozzio · · Score: 4, Funny

      /. can't let you edit/delete your post, no matter when!

      FTFY.

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    5. Re:Testable! by fractoid · · Score: 4, Funny

      Future You liked the post you will have did shall post better than the one you were going to intending posted was in the yesterday future.

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    6. Re:Testable! by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 2

      Well, there are twelve tenses, and the only reason to change verb tense is to show WHEN something happened. It's obsessive. Other languages are much more casual. Chinese, for its monumental difficulty, has only two verb tenses (thank GOD).

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    7. Re:Testable! by FriendlyPrimate · · Score: 2

      A bigger question is where in SPACE are these particles going to appear (assuming it comes back at the same point in space it left)? If the particle moves back in time 1 second, the LHC will be 250km away from where it's going to be when the particle disappears (assuming speed relative to the center of our galaxy, but choose your own frame of reference). How would this ever be possible to test?

    8. Re:Testable! by Em+Adespoton · · Score: 2

      Obviously, the relative location will use the LHC as its reference point, not the centre of our galaxy. This means that as long as the particles are sent back in time inside the LHC, there should be no problem. Ejecting time-distorted matter from the LHC could cause some problems though.

      This does raise another issue though... if particles in the LHC are sent back in time, does this mean that you can set things up such that a particle collides with multiple instances of itself? If so, when does the energy get released from the collision?

    9. Re:Testable! by amRadioHed · · Score: 2

      My understanding is that languages such as German and Japanese have much more complicated verbs then English, though that is not to say that English verbs are in any way easy. Chinese on the other hand has no verb tenses. What are you considering as the second verb form, the addition of the le particle?

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  2. No paradoxes? by mangu · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:No paradoxes? by Purity+Of+Essence · · Score: 2

      My grandfather was dead before this machine was built you insensitive clod!

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    2. Re:No paradoxes? by mangu · · Score: 4, Funny

      I bet he would be far more interested to know about the results of the horse race than the results of the race horse.

      It's already happening! I could swear I typed the word 'horse' before I typed 'race'...

    3. Re:No paradoxes? by somersault · · Score: 2

      More like because it wouldn't really be "travelling back in time", it would (if it worked) be spawning different realities, or communicating with already existing realities which are separate from our own. Slightly creepy, and also it doesn't seem that plausible. Not that it's impossible..

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    4. Re:No paradoxes? by geminidomino · · Score: 4, Funny

      That's all we need. Fucking Anonymous forkbombing the universe.

      What could possibly go wrong?

  3. Am I the only one by Xacid · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Am I the only one by MozeeToby · · Score: 2

      I have a theory that any theory which allows for time travel will be proven wrong. For example, general relativity allows for time travel, but requires negative mass-energy. We're know general relativity is mostly right, so negative mass-energy, being the larger assumption, is probably wrong.

    2. Re:Am I the only one by tlhIngan · · Score: 2

      Am I the only one who gets absolutely frustrated that people are still proposing the possibility of time-travel?

      We can time-travel today. Relativity says so. And we compensate for it already, too.

      The downside is that we can only go in one direction - forward. There's two ways to do it - get really close to a gravity well (GPS satellites intentionally "run fast" because of this - time ticks slower the further away you get from a gravity well), or really, just move (though you have to go really, really, really fast if you want to go forward in time at any reasonable pace).

      Travelling backwards in time, though, is quite infeasible theoretically. Imagine you can open a portal to which you can transfer something (matter or energy, doesn't matter since they're equivalent). You're going to end up transferring a lot of "stuff" inadvertently - so even if you wanted to kill yourself in the past by shooting a bullet through the portal, you've got everything else that's being sent across the portal as well - subatomic particles that spawn into existence (what happens if one of the pair goes through and the other doesn't?). There will be so many violations of existing fundamental physics laws (conservation of mass/energy, momentum, etc) that things just go weird. (You have to account for the possibility that whatever you send across will not ever go through the portal again and thus end up existing in the past the whole time - basically a "free" cloning mechanism.

    3. Re:Am I the only one by richie2000 · · Score: 2

      I am a time traveller... I am moving into the future at a speed of one second per second.

      I shall have you know that I am travelling into the future at the astounding rate of no less than sixty seconds every minute.

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  4. Re:Message Not Received by xMrFishx · · Score: 2

    Dinosaurs can't read, and there's a whole lot of "past" to aim it at.

  5. Pseudo science FTW! by theendlessnow · · Score: 2

    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.

  6. 88mph? by gravos · · Score: 4, Funny

    Is it really so difficult to get the atoms up to 88 miles per hour?

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  7. Hasn't Been Said Yet by SplicerNYC · · Score: 2

    You're remembering the future.

  8. The "Time Modem" by Dr.+Manhattan · · Score: 2
    Exactly. If you can send information into the past - which effectively means sending mass/energy - that's all you need. You don't have to send individual bits. You could send emails. You could send sound files. Heck, you could hook up some cameras and watch the future in... er... 'real time'.

    The only question is the bandwidth, and how many people have access to the channel. See here.

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  9. Re:Avoids paradoxes? Yeah... right. by ledow · · Score: 2

    Hitman acts on message from "man from the future". Kills someone. That someone never has a child. That child never sent the message back. Hitman still claims that he received the message until the day he dies.

    A paradox only occurs if you believe time is linear. What if time bifurcates at every decision, as some philosophers/scientists have posited? Then the "you" that sent the message wasn't the "you" that was never born, hence it's still valid and the hitman still *received* the message to act on, even if, from that point on in that particular "Trouser of Time", the message never got sent back.

    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.

  10. Yawn by jd2112 · · Score: 2

    Wake me when the headlines read "LHC researcher wins multiple lotteries".

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  11. Re:Message Not Received by srussia · · Score: 2

    What does a receiver look like for this kind of message?

    Oh I dunno, something like this?

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  12. Re:avoiding paradox? by elewton · · Score: 2

    No, because if you keep doing it, eventually some future will hit YOUR timeline, and you get a message from a different future?

  13. Why does time travel have to involve paradox? by Dr.+Manhattan · · Score: 2

    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.

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  14. Oh fabulous.... by lumpenprole · · Score: 2

    The Future: A first post, stamping on an article, forever.

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  15. Re:Causality by Locke2005 · · Score: 2

    So how did the Universe inflate at a rate much greater than the speed of light shortly after the big bang?

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  16. Re:Avoids paradoxes? Yeah... right. by MistrX · · Score: 2

    That last thing happens from time to time. Some loony kills a guy in defence of it being an message from the future.
    Does that mean that it works?

  17. To The Future by The_Dougster · · Score: 2

    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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