Via NAACAL.What Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, are suggesting is that the Higgs boson, the particle that physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be “abhorrent to nature”.
What does that mean? According to Nielsen, it means that the creation of the boson at some point in the future would then ripple backwards through time to put a stop to whatever it was that had created it in the first place...
This, says Nielsen, could explain why the LHC has been hit by mishaps ranging from an explosion during construction to a second big bang that followed its start-up. Whether the recent arrest of a leading physicist for alleged links with Al-Qaeda also counts is uncertain.
21 October 2009
Is the Large Hadron Collider sabotaging itself? - from the future?
The LHC has been plagued by breakdowns. A new theory - offered by serious scientists - proposes that these are not random events, but rather than some event in the future is coming back to stop the LHC's progress:
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But if it's preventing itself from ever having been created in the first place ...
ReplyDeleteMaybe that's what happens when you hire the lowest bidder to build your collider. Live and learn.
ReplyDeleteProposed by serious scientists, but proposed seriously?
ReplyDeleteYou could use the same excuse for anything. As far as I know, that guy hasn't published or shown anything regarding his idea.
ReplyDeleteMaybe the reason I can't get a 100 in biochemistry is because 100s in biochemistry are so abhorrent to nature that any time I do it, its effects ripple backwards through time and make me have a bad night's sleep the night before every exam.
The paper hasn't been published in a journal; it was submitted to a rapid-dissemination-archive Web site. Here's the abstract:
ReplyDeletehttp://arxiv.org/abs/0707.1919v1
Links to subsequent versions of the paper are found under "Submission history."
(Note that the first version predicting trouble with the LHC appeared in 2007.)
According to the site:
"arXiv is an e-print service in the fields of physics, mathematics, non-linear science, computer science, quantitative biology and statistics. The contents of arXiv conform to Cornell University academic standards. arXiv is owned, operated and funded by Cornell University, a private not-for-profit educational institution. arXiv is also partially funded by the National Science Foundation."
In other words, it's respectable. This kind of electronic publishing is the latest thing in cutting-edge fields of science. The normal publishing process takes too long and is too selective; it inhibits dissemination of ideas to the scientific community.
I've been fascinated by this story since it first hit the mainstream media. There's a fascinating post about it on Discover's Cosmic Variance blog:
http://tinyurl.com/yjvhmht
The writer of the post points out that Nielsen isn't proposing that his idea is the way things really work; rather, he's taken a novel idea and worked out the logical implications in a scientific manner. It's an exercise, in other words.
"So the feminists and pagans are right: God *is* a woman. Named Higgs. Who doesn't fancy us staring at her boson." said a commenter on that thread.
ReplyDeletebrilliant! :D
Self-canceling paradox. If it were a future civilization returning to successfully destroy it, then there'd be no reason to return from the future to destroy it.
ReplyDeleteThey aren't suggesting a future civilization travels back in time to stop it. They're suggesting nature itself does it--can't help doing it, in fact.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous-
ReplyDeleteThe key there is SUCCESSFULLY destroying it. What if they failed and these are last-ditch efforts?