Might Higgs boson be a time-traveling ne'er do well out to destroy the LHC?
By Joseph L. Flatley 
posted October 13th 2009 7:53PM
posted October 13th 2009 7:53PM
We've certainly seen our fair share of crackpot theories regarding the Large Hadron Collider, and quite frankly the whole thing is becoming rather old hat. That said, when the New York Times comes up with something as far out as this, we most certainly have to share it with you. It seems that way back in July, 2007 two theoretical physicists (Danish string theory pioneer Holger Bech Nielsen and the Japanese physicist Masao Ninomiya), proposed an unlikely explanation as to why the LHC and the Superconducting Supercollider before it seem to be particularly accident prone. According to science writer Dennis Overbye, the Higgs boson (which the collider has been designed to observe) "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." Makes sense, right? Of course, we don't have any idea how these elementary particles might actually conduct the business of destroying equipment, but that hasn't stopped the duo from proposing a novel way to test this theory.
According to a paper published earlier this month, a simple deck of cards could be made, either out of construction paper or, if you're feeling high tech, simulated on a computer. The deck would have one card indicating that the LHC should be shut down, and a much larger number of cards (maybe 100 million or so) that indicate that everything is good to go. If you draw the death card, as it were, you can bet that the shadowy hand of the Higgs boson is stretching back in time, telling you to halt the operation. Between all this and the proposed hyperdrive propulsion tests we came across a couple days ago, things are starting to get very Philip K. Dick over at CERN. Can we make one suggestion? Instead of a random number generator, why not Tarot cards? Or a Ouija board? You know, go for a Halloween vibe.
[Via New Scientist]
According to a paper published earlier this month, a simple deck of cards could be made, either out of construction paper or, if you're feeling high tech, simulated on a computer. The deck would have one card indicating that the LHC should be shut down, and a much larger number of cards (maybe 100 million or so) that indicate that everything is good to go. If you draw the death card, as it were, you can bet that the shadowy hand of the Higgs boson is stretching back in time, telling you to halt the operation. Between all this and the proposed hyperdrive propulsion tests we came across a couple days ago, things are starting to get very Philip K. Dick over at CERN. Can we make one suggestion? Instead of a random number generator, why not Tarot cards? Or a Ouija board? You know, go for a Halloween vibe.
[Via New Scientist]
@Brak: Well, it is the "god particle," so...
Interesting theory... and it posits that one of the properties of the Higgs Boson is that it alters probabilities in addition to being able to travel backwards in time. An impossibility layered on top of an improbability. Or is it? I for one am not ready to be shunted into another universe--which is the other implied property.
Or maybe we just have Puppeteers secretly watching CERN.
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/Large-Hadron-Collider-Al-Qaeda,news-4828.html
So that guy isn't really a terrorist, but a guy sent back in time...to destroy skyne...err the large hadron collider before it could exist?
The only problem I see in this is that if the particles for said machine are to be destroyed by the machine in the future, shouldn't that mean that the particles are already destroyed now?
Great Scott!
+1 for the use of the word "abhorrent"
It's simple really... once it happens, we start to see things around the world being changed quickly, but not until 5 days until the whole world is destroyed.
Of course, you have 7 DAYS to travel back in time to correct the mistake, so I think we'll always be safe.
Maybe the Higgs keeps pulling the plug behind the LHC.
Duh. Everyone knows the Higgs Boson is a hairball hacked up by Schrodinger's Cat on a random carpet in the eleventh dimension every vernal equinox of a leap year. Silly quantum physicists.
silly atlasfugged: ... on the vernal equinox of every leap year.
So let me see if I got this right: If Jack's plan worked, the LHC will never have been turned on and Kate ends up in prison and Charlie never dies?
Mark)
You have to love when people commenting on the internet think they can disprove a scientific theory in a few sentences while playing wow.
Yes, the theory is bloody weird and outrageous and most likely to be proven wrong shortly, but sometimes physics is just that... weird and outrageous. And this is unusually funny and cute which is science at its best.
You don't draw a 1 in 100.000.000 out of dumb luck. Clearly the "deck of cards" should be some quantum measurement. Don't bitch at scientists for trying to put things in layman terms.
OK, this is a little silly. Since when were elemental particles or the forces of nature regarded as sentient?
If the Higgs Boson were "abhorrent to nature" then why the hell would it exist in the first place? It's *part* of nature. If the Higgs boson is somehow "abhorrent", are tau-neutrinos? Certain muons? Photons of a particular frequency? Mesons? X-rays generated between 11.23 and 12.14 GMT on a Sunday (adjusting for daylight savings time)?
When my PC breaks is it because electrons have suddenly become abhorrent, so some force is coming back in time to blow my power supply?
Particle collisions stronger than the LHC happen at the top of our atmosphere every day, not to mention everywhere else in the universe - why hasn't this intelligent, sentient force sending some forces back in time to introduce flaws into magnets done something about that? Why hasn't it decayed all matter in the universe to prevent cosmic rays slamming into asteroids orbiting Tau Ceti from generating Higgs Bosons?
Look, it's a phenomenally large and complex science project involving phenomenally large and complex engineering. Problems should be no surprise. When a government IT system launches a year behind schedule, nobody puts it down to some mystic time travelling force spoiling it. Normal "s**t happens" is a good enough explanation. How far behind the original, day one schedule is the F-22 Raptor fighter program? How much is it over budget? A couple of engineering failures at CERN is trivial by comparison.
A simple idea would be to assume the multi-universe view of quantum reality.
All universes that result in the higgs boson are impossible (according to the authors) and do therefore not exists.
There is no need for the particles to be sentient - you are just getting confused by the language. It is quite common to talk about the "wants" of nature in physics. It can be confusing for an outsider, but trust me... Noone here is talking about sentient quantum particles.
You're thinking of it in the wrong way. They are only abhorrent to nature in their visible forms. When simply acting as careers of force, and cannot not be detected, they have not problem existing. But when you force it out of it's normal state into a detectable form in high energy situations, it really doesn't want to be in that form. In fact, that's the deal with a lot of the elementary particles we've discovered, they can only be detected in supercolliders.
@jitty
ok thats helps, but what is meant by the "deck of cards" software and how would it be implemented? Test Case?
Alright, you guys can try to justify this however you want, but first of all: Neither "randomly" drawing a card from a deck or having a computer "randomly" do so is actually random. The first is based entirely on the predictable actions of the person shuffling the card and the second is completely based on the system clock tick time. Neither are at all random, so you are just as well off trying that as you are just saying whether or not you think it's happening and taking that result as truth.
Second of all: Even if you could come up with a purely random method of doing this, who's to say it won't just pass and leave the LHC to break again? Who's to say you won't just end up drawing the "death card" just out of dumb luck? There's no possible way to test this theory, aside from the fact that it's just logically impossible to be true(if the abhorrent particles are sending a force back in time to make themselves not exist, then how are they existing to send said force?).
I had to test this, so I pulled out my trusty TI-83 that I stole from my brother, whipped up a program to pick a random number between 1 and 1000000000000. If it equaled 8 of my random keystrokes, then that was the kill card.
I ran this program, and my calculator went crazy and drew funny Asian characters at me. Does this mean the Higgs blossom is Asian?
*failed at writing bosom*
No, I think you failed at writing boson. ;-)
ARGH! My hands hate me. That's the only excuse I can come up with. Oh, and now my calculator hates me more. I stole it's backup battery on accident and killed my quadratic equation solving program I made two years ago, and an RPG I was writing. :(
Now see what you did? Just look at what happened to you. You don't mess with the Higgs boson, man. *tsk tsk*
i would like to know dr. shedlon cooper's thoughts
As long as the Higgs Boson doesn't sit in his spot, he's OK with it.
Bazinga!
You Scientologists cannot stop the Large Hadron Collider. Despite your attempts at infiltrating our lab, we will get it to work, and then Xenu will be released from his cosmic prison.
paradox fail.
Nice Philip K. Dick reference. This does remind me of some of his short stories, so who is the main protagonist who shall reveal to us our impending doom in relation to science?
The LHC is a giant machine with endless numbers of components linked with endless strings of wire and fiber optic cables. The more complex the machine, the more likely it is to break.
The "time ripple" theory is possible, but how can a ripple break one machine, and only one machine?
We all know that if they run this machine everyone on Earth will blackout for 2 minutes & 17 seconds and get a glimpse of the future !!
Don't be stupid. Clearly what'll happen is the sky will turn purple for a bit and then the whole thing will explode, leaving some guy inside it able to see the future. Oh, and then a giant smoke monster will start eating people.
It's frustrating to see weird hypotheses like these are well-hyped but poorly explained to the public.
Many professionals are approaching the consensus that because time does not actually exist, time travel (actual freedom to move forward and backward as one wishes relative to the rest of the universe) is not possible. It's actually funny because it's yet another 'Newton vs. Leibniz' debate...
I just did a test for it. Grabbed 100 pieces of spaghetti and tried to break them in half. I didn't get any to exactly break in half. Hence I proved that the higg's boson doesn't and therefore disproved almost all major modern physics. I'll take my Nobel prize please and thank you.
perhaps this higgs boson guy travel back in time to prevent the end of the world from exploding in 2012...
but since the world insists on exploding in 2012, and higgs keeps going back in time to prevent it, our datetime will effectively be stuck in 2012 in an endless loop....
How about they put a poster on a wall that says,"Tear me from the future if we end up destroying the world"
I want that Ouija Board wallpaper!
What if the Higgs boson doesn't understand English? But maybe just German or French?
welcome to the world of tomorrow.
Just remember:
Imagination is limitless
Ignorance is bliss
and what you believe is fact...
What a load of BS... They might find some new particles, perhaps even the underlying fractal nature of energy... but thats it. No silly time traveling gremlins.
So if I tell my boss that the computer is going back in time and breaking itself it could fly and not make me seem full of fail?
Einstein was right about the shortcomings of Quantum Mechanics and so therefore String Theory is also the incorrect approach. As an alternative to Quantum Theory there is a new theory that describes and explains the mysteries of physical reality. While not disrespecting the value of Quantum Mechanics as a tool to explain the role of quanta in our universe. This theory states that there is also a classical explanation for the paradoxes such as EPR and the Wave-Particle Duality. The Theory is called the Theory of Super Relativity and is located at: http://www.superrelativity.org
This theory is a philosophical attempt to reconnect the physical universe to realism and deterministic concepts. It explains the mysterious.
It's good to see that PhD Physicists can smoke a blunt now and then too.
or maybe these scientists are trying to destroy the hard-on collider, and so they released this info to confuse everyone in order for them to travel back in time and sabotage wiring so it doesn't work in the present. So that they can make this release and earn fame, thus giving them .... ahhhh
Not to interrupt the witty banter, but...we are on the cusp of discovering that all we can imagine can be brought to existence, which may finally bring us up to Type-1 civilization status. The internetz haz already made us into a form of hive-mind, with limitless information (some even verifiable!) a few clicks away. Could there be some other intelligence trying to prevent us from gaining certain abilities? Or could there be some sort of multi-dimension threshhold we are not allowed to cross? For whatever reason, someone, or something, is delaying the inevitable-this experiment will happen, and the results will be astounding and world-changing. Trust me. There are so many things we are not even aware of that are at play here- procede with an open mind. Try to decipher what the ancients wrote and believed in, because we have forgotten the wisdom of our elders.
Without observers nothing can be said, nothing can be explained nothing can be claimed...The quantum Observer-created Reality dictates that before something exists it must be observed..Reality is not fixed but very mutable..Now where in these truths is there room for a massive scalar elementary particle to exist that can somehow have a cause and effect without being observed??
....and this is where the Big Bang began. The circle continues, the snake eats its own tail!
Time to choose Mr Freeman ,it's time to choose
There was actually an excellent sci-fi book that came out about ten years ago called "Einstein's Bridge" that held a variation on this theory as its central plot line. People from the future came back in time to stop the creation of the SSC in Texas because its high energy experiments would lead to our destruction. Highly recommended.