Large Hadron Collider gearing up for bizarre test

[The Straight Story]

Collider gearing up for bizarre test

More than a year after an explosion of sparks, soot and frigid helium shut it down, the world's biggest and most expensive physics experiment, known as the Large Hadron Collider, is poised to start up again. In December, if all goes well, protons will start smashing together in an underground racetrack outside Geneva in a search for forces and particles that reigned during the first trillionth of a second of the Big Bang.

Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I'm not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No, I'm talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

Holger Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, put this idea forward in a series of papers with such titles as "Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal" and "Search for Future Influence From LHC," posted on the physics Web site arXiv.org in the last year and a half.

According to the so-called Standard Model that rules almost all physics, the Higgs is responsible for imbuing other elementary particles with mass.

"It must be our prediction that all Higgs-producing machines shall have bad luck," Nielsen said in an e-mail message. In an unpublished essay, Nielsen said of the theory, "Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God." It is their guess, he went on, "that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them."

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/10/18/BUHE1A4NJB.DTL&type=science#ixzz0UJUI8kQL

[cliffordu]

1. I keep misreading the name of that damned thing.

'The Large Hardon Collider'

[baldguy]

6. Now THAT'S something ENTIRELY different!

[The Straight Story]

8. I had a gf once that was a large hardon collider

:rofl:

[kitkat65]

2. So, in essence, I've created this in order for it to never have been created?

That's so out there, it just might work! This theory and hypothesis stuff just amazes me when I read it. Sounds like an idea for a high-budget sci-fi movie.

[The Straight Story]

4. It is like electing someone new to continue the policies of the last person you didn't like

:rofl:

[MyshkinCommaPrince]

3. Bizarre it is!

Almost broke my poor, little brain. Let's see. If this theory is really what they're testing, then they can disprove the theory by actually producing a Higgs particle. But how can they determine that failure to generate the particle is actually due to interference from future Higgs particles and not some more commonplace cause? Umm. I think I may need a lie-down now. Contemplating temporal strange loops makes my head spin.

Neat article! Thank you. :D

[The Straight Story]

5. I posted my reply before you wrote your comment

:smoke:

[HysteryDiagnosis]

13. They need just go through the motions... fake it, then if something

bad happens they'll know they pulled a fast one on the Higgs... or not.

[C_U_L8R]

7. If it will just send the rightwingers back to their own time

some paleo- or neo- era where their silly beliefs won't bother anybody but protozoa and sludge

[Fumesucker]

9. "If quantum theory doesn't blow your mind, you don't properly understand it"

That was a quote from an interesting book I'm reading right now, "Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness"..

I may have paraphrased a bit but that is the concept the authors were trying to get across.

[Posteritatis]

10. Here's hoping the titanic fear wank over this run won't be as bad as the previous one.. (nt)

[The Straight Story]

11. IIRC the previous one was just firing the machine up but it didn't do the actual test (nt)

[Posteritatis]

12. People still howled as much as they did with LCROSS recently, though. (nt)

[SoCalDem]

14. does it involve a partially inflated sliver saucer balloon? n/t

[Dreamer Tatum]

15. I wish I could do that to the dinner mywife is planning to cook tonight nt