6394021
story
Comments: 691 +- Science: The LHC, the Higgs Boson, and Fate on Tuesday October 13, @01:52PM
Posted
by
kdawson
on Tuesday October 13, @01:52PM
from the particle-that-doesn't-want-to-be-discovered dept.
from the particle-that-doesn't-want-to-be-discovered dept.
background: url(//a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/topicscience.gif); width:62px; height:75px;
science
Reader Maximum Prophet sends a piece from the NY Times by the usually reliable Dennis Overbye reporting on a "crazy" theory being worked up by a pair of "otherwise distinguished physicists": that the Large Hadron Collider's difficulties may be due to the universe's reluctance to produce a Higgs boson. Maximum Prophet adds, "This happened to the Superconducting Super Collider in the science fiction story Einstein's Bridge. Now Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, are theorizing that it's happening in real life." "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."
Related Stories
Large Hadron Collider Struggling 371 comments
News: LHC Successfully Cools To 1.9K In Lead-Up To Restart 177 comments
The LHC, the Higgs Boson, and the Chicago Cubs 194 comments
Life and Work On the LHC At CERN 80 comments
"You who hate the Jews so, why did you adopt their religion?"
-- Friedrich Nietzsche, addressing anti-semitic Christians
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2009 Geeknet, Inc.
That's Groovy (Score:5, Funny)
I think casting Keanu Reeves as Neils Bohr was a stroke of unmatched brilliance.
Lady GaGa is, of course, a surprise as "the loathsome particle". She does a good Burlesconi imitation, all thing considered...
So... (Score:5, Interesting)
We created the universe that we are trying to figure out who made it.
Re:So... (Score:5, Funny)
Psssh, the lengths they'll go to with these silly excuses. I say stop being lazy and get the damned thing working already!
Parent
Perfect... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Perfect... (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, if you go ahead and tell your wife that, it may just be that one of your descendants would just be so abhorrent that the universe decided you should not be allowed to breed, and this is the method it's using to enforce that.
Parent
Re:Perfect... (Score:5, Funny)
You can tell her, but she'll probably stop listening after "because," at which point she'll begin recalling everything you've ever done wrong, and start reeling them off in a run on sentence not unlike this one, taking the collective, including your most recent attempt to get out of making dinner, to mean that you don't love her, which raises the question of why you're even together, except that you obviously just want your needs satisfied while she does EVERYTHING, and you don't even care.
Either that or she'll just start making dinner without saying anything, in which case you're in *real* trouble. If so, DO NOT EAT THE FOOD, because it's probably poisoned, but also don't let her know that you're not eating the food, because it will only be taken as an insult to her cooking and further enrage her.
Parent
Get a grip (Score:5, Insightful)
It was completely over the top for humour value. No one is taking this seriously. No one in their right mind anyway. So there's no secret agenda to oppress women here.
The same women that complain about these jokes as being sexist usually have no problem with jokes about men. Get a grip. I'm a fat guy but I still laugh at some fat jokes. It's called having a sense of humour.
Parent
vulcans already knew time travel....... (Score:4, Funny)
but seriously, if it came back through time we should be able to detect it.
Re:vulcans already knew time travel....... (Score:4, Insightful)
No, I think the theory is that a universe in which we create a Higgs boson is impossible, because such a universe would not only cease to be, but cease to have ever been as soon as the boson appears.
Parent
Re:vulcans already knew time travel....... (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
FSM did it (Score:5, Funny)
I'm thinking noodly appendages are involved.
Larry Niven took it one step further. (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a stupid theory (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This is a stupid theory (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:This is a stupid theory (Score:4, Funny)
I'm my own grandpaw.
I'm My Own Grandpa
( Lonzo & Oscar )
It sounds funny, I know,
But it really is so,
Oh, I'm my own grandpa.
I'm my own grandpa.
I'm my own grandpa.
It sounds funny, I know,
But it really is so,
Oh, I'm my own grandpa.
Now many, many years ago, when I was twenty-three,
I was married to a widow who was pretty as could be.
This widow had a grown-up daughter who had hair of red.
My father fell in love with her, and soon they, too, were wed.
This made my dad my son-in-law and changed my very life,
My daughter was my mother, cause she was my father's wife.
To complicate the matter, even though it brought me joy,
I soon became the father of a bouncing baby boy.
My little baby then became a brother-in-law to Dad,
And so became my uncle, though it made me very sad.
For if he was my uncle, then that also made him brother
Of the widow's grown-up daughter, who, of course, was my stepmother.
Father's wife then had a son who kept him on the run,
And he became my grandchild, for he was my daughter's son.
My wife is now my mother's mother, and it makes me blue,
Because, although she is my wife, she's my grandmother, too.
Now if my wife is my grandmother, then I'm her grandchild,
And everytime I think of it, it nearly drives me wild,
For now I have become the strangest case you ever saw
As husband of my grandmother, I am my own grandpa!
I'm my own grandpa.
I'm my own grandpa.
It sounds funny, I know, but it really is so,
Oh, I'm my own grandpa.
Parent
To say... (Score:5, Funny)
that the Higgs boson is abhorrent to Nature is ridiculous.
Please don't anthropomorphize particles. They don't like when you do that.
Re:To say... (Score:5, Insightful)
" ... [To say] that the Higgs boson is abhorrent to Nature is ridiculous. ..."
Of course it is. Being ridiculous is the absolute minimum required of anything worthy of study by Physicists; when it is no longer ridiculous it ascends to theory.
Parent
Re:To say... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:To say... (Score:5, Informative)
Please don't anthropomorphize particles. They don't like when you do that.
Hehe. I quite like anthropomorphized particles: http://www.particlezoo.net/ [particlezoo.net]
Parent
I believe that would be Niven's Law... (Score:4, Interesting)
[citation provided] [wikipedia.org]
I got a particular kick out of the phrase "otherwise distinguished physicists" in the summary.
Imagination is a fine thing... (Score:5, Insightful)
pull the other one (Score:5, Insightful)
[quote]the Large Hadron Collider's difficulties may be due to the universe's reluctance to produce a Higgs boson[/quote]
Let's apply Occam's Razor. One of two cases must be true, either:
(a) "the Large Hadron Collider's difficulties may be due to the universe's reluctance to produce a Higgs boson"
or
(b) building a machine like this is rather complicated and it might take a few goes before they get it right.
Of course, there could be an option (c) they really suck. I'll try that on my boss the next time I fuck something up. "No, see, it's not that I'm not any good at my job, it's that the universe is conspiring against the proper completion of the project. Have I ever mentioned Schroedinger's Cat?"
Re:pull the other one (Score:5, Interesting)
But the great thing is, they propose an experiment to *test* whether this is happening.
Parent
Re:pull the other one (Score:5, Funny)
> Where are we gonna get 50 million cats?
My ex-wife's house.
Parent
Original concept from "Doomsday Device" (Score:5, Interesting)
by John Gribbin, (Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, 105(2):120?125, Feb 1985). In that story a powerful particle accelerator seemingly fails to operate, for no good reason. Then a physicist realizes that if it were to work, it would effectively destroy the entire universe, by initiating a transition from a cosmological false vacuum state to a lower-energy vacuum state. In this story, the explanation of the failures assumes a many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. So instead of explicit backward causality, there is effective backward causality: only the branches of reality with equipment failures contain observers; therefore, observers can only experience histories with equipment failures. The effect is the same.
I also discussed this idea in the context of novel models of computation in my MIT Ph.D. thesis, Games, Puzzles, and Computation [mit.edu] (section 8.2; also published as a book by A.K. Peters). The idea was a bit similar to Nielsen and Ninomiya's proposed experiment. It turns out that by connecting an accelerator capable of destroying the universe to a computation depending on random numbers, one could in principle solve problems that are otherwise intractable. I termed this "doomsday computation", as a variation on the similar concept of "anthropic computation" proposed earlier by Scott Aaronson.
Re:Original concept from "Doomsday Device" (Score:5, Funny)
It turns out that by connecting an accelerator capable of destroying the universe to a computation depending on random numbers, one could in principle solve problems that are otherwise intractable. I termed this "doomsday computation"
Was that right after you published your paper on Bistromath?
Parent
Whenever Something Doesn't Work (Score:5, Funny)
I dunno (Score:5, Funny)
This theory is not to be taken seriously (Score:5, Interesting)
It has a serious, and might I saw, rather obvious flaw
If the activation of the LHC created some kind of cataclysmic event which would some fuck up time to the extent of violating causality, and if the universe does indeed have causality as a boundary condition, then there are far more probable ways of averting the fatal collision than screwing up several tonnes of magnet months before the high energy firings were scheduled to take place.
The universe could simply induce a sufficient e/m force to stop the proton beams colliding. It wouldn't take much, on a cosmic scale, and would be a far more likely outcome than an entire macroscopic object being foobared just to protect the continuity of the universe.
Re:This theory is not to be taken seriously (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the other way around. The universe "does" nothing. It merely prevents certain scenario's from happening. You might think of the current situation as one of infinitely many parallel universes. That we're currently slashdotting in the one were those magnets happened to fail, does not mean that that is the only scenario happening, it merely means that we happen to be in that universe, in that timeline. In other timelines they're probably discussing why a meterorite happened fall exactly on the LHC;-)
Parent
Re:This theory is not to be taken seriously (Score:5, Funny)
Wizards.
Parent
Superstition (Score:5, Insightful)
I have to point out that this is merely superstitious thought; there is no evidence to indicate that this is the reason why the collider failed, and while the theory *is* possible, it defies rationality. The simplest/most obvious explanation is the the collider simply failed due to technical reasons due to flaws in design or construction. Anyone could tell you that. Saying that it didn't happen because the Universe simply didn't allow it is the same as if you just substituted "God" for the word "Universe." Why didn't X happen? God didn't allow it. Why did Y happen? God made it happen. I'm not saying that it's wrong to believe in God, but these "explanations" are really non-explanations.
Higgs is everywhere. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is ridiculous and not worthy of any publication, let alone the NYT (and should not be propagated on slashdot, imho).
In short, the Higgs boson (if theories are correct) is a scalar that provides mass to all particles. That means it is present at all times everywhere. So, although it is tongue in cheek, we are swimming in an invisible soup of Higgs particles at each moment. To say that universe doesn't want us to create one is like saying people are born blind because the universe didn't want us to experience light.
Schrodinger's Cookies (Score:5, Funny)
As proof of this, the NY-Times article can only be read by some observers but not others.
Re:Could happen (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Could happen (Score:5, Funny)
Goat C. Worst. Syntax. Ever.
Look at it this way. If the number of (one-syllable-name + one-letter) rappers and hip-hop artists continues to increase, then eventually all possible names will be taken. So, unless that trend fades, someday there will be a fresh new urban act called "Goat C". Fate, twisted master that it is, will make this person famous. Just in time for you to have kids or possibly grandkids. And they will ask you if you've seen Goat C, because he's awesome.
And then you will be horrified.
Then the TV ads will start about how Goat C will be appearing live at your local arena. You won't be able to tune it out like other ads, simply because of the surprise the first time you hear it. Every time you hear the baseline that opens the ad, every time you hear his music, everywhere you turn, you hear people praising Goat C or exhorting you to pay money to see Goat C.
Then he will make a remix of your favorite song. So your favorite song will be forever linked to Goat C.
And that is when the nightmares begin.
Parent
Re:Could happen (Score:4, Interesting)
The difference between theory and practice is that nothing in the universe actually conforms to your perceptions and everything you know is not even wrong. You are not even really "you" in any sense beyond the illusory narrative created by the mind, to order its disparate sensations.
Black hole? Maths say they exist - but you will never really know, nor will it ever really matter - if you cannot even know your "self".
"In theory there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is". I paraphrase this as:
"To the imagination, it is identical with reality, when Reality is so totally comprehensive that all of imagination is an infinitesimal subset."
But the mind is a little thing - with such a limited set of tools and perceptions, on such a tiny scale.
Parent
Re:Could happen (Score:4, Insightful)
You are not even really "you" in any sense beyond the illusory narrative created by the mind, to order its disparate sensations.
That depends very much by what you mean by "illusion", and what you mean by "you". If I identify myself as this particular chunk of matter in the state it is at the moment, then yes, I am me.
It's like describing a program as an illusion. In the sense that it abstract, perhaps. But it does have real, physical consequences -- at the very least, the color of the pixels on your screen (or which ones are lit by how much, if you want to be pedantic).
Black hole? Maths say they exist - but you will never really know... Reality is so totally comprehensive that all of imagination is an infinitesimal subset.
Perhaps. What is your evidence for this?
It seems to me that we are refining our understanding of reality, but the subset which we do understand, we understand fairly well. It has been a very long time since we've been truly and profoundly wrong -- and even then, we weren't.
For example: It was once believed that the earth is flat. But even this is not particularly wrong. On the scales most of us deal with in day-to-day life, a flat earth is a good approximation.
It was once believed that the sun revolved around the earth. This is still a good approximation, for most purposes here on the ground. It is only when we begin to consider the motion of other planets that it becomes important which is which.
People often point to Newton being "disproved" by Einstein, as a way to show how "unreliable" modern science is -- usually in an effort to promote some non-science, such as religion or "Intelligent Design". What they miss is that Einstein was, for all practical purposes, a refinement of Newton -- the Newtonian equations are at the core of the relativistic ones, and most of the time, we still use Newtonian physics, because it's still a good approximation and is easier to calculate.
So while I agree that there is always more to understand, we shouldn't pretend we know nothing simply because we don't know everything.
So, going back to what you've said here:
Black hole? Maths say they exist - but you will never really know,
In the sense that I can "really know" anything beyond the internal consistency of mathematical and logical systems, I can know that black holes exist, until a better explanation comes along. And as I've shown, that "better explanation" probably won't look that different than the one we have now.
For example, it is possible that we are wrong about what the singularity of a black hole looks like. But it seems unlikely that anything would ever make its way back out -- and if it did, it probably would not come back the way it went in. Even if black holes were shown to be an entirely different phenomenon, it seems unlikely we'd show that it isn't somehow swallowing up matter, energy, even light.
Parent
Re:Could happen (Score:5, Insightful)
If information theory wants to stop us from observing a higgs boson then we won't be able to observe it in the experiment. What won't happen is that every time we try to test it some mechanical component breaks down. That's ridiculous.
Parent
Re:Could happen (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps the sum of solution spaces where the machine is never turned on is greater than the sum of the solution spaces where it gets turned on but doesn't find what it's looking for?
Parent
Re:Could happen (Score:5, Interesting)
Uhm...you forgot "according to current theory" in that statement. We think there are no exceptions, but if we find one then the theory has to be changed.
Theory is only our current working simulation of how we think the universe works; the universe itself plays by its own rules which may or may not match our theories.
Parent
Re:Could happen (Score:5, Informative)
A pair of entangled particles has the property that, if someone takes a measurement on each of them, forcing each into one of a pair of eigenstates, knowing which state one of them collapsed into tells you which state the other one collapsed into - even if the separation between the two measurements is spacelike rather than timelike (i.e. even if a signal from one of them "telling" the other which state to pick would have to propagate faster than light.)
But you can't force your particle to pick one of the two options for its own collapse, and thus force the other to pick a state of your choosing and send a bit of information faster than light. The PARTICLE gets to make the pick. You can't distinguish whether the particles communicate FTL, the pick was already made when they initially became entangled and carried by some "hidden variable" until the measurement (though there's reason to believe it's not a hidden variable), they were just predestined to act that way, or whatever. (Physics says WHAT it does but, at least so far, not HOW.)
The most you can do is measure a DIFFERENT thing about the particle when you force the collapse (such as the polarization along a different axis if you're measuring polarization), in which case you lose all knowledge about how the other particle's measurement came out.
So if there is an FTL communications link there, it's useful for the particles but apparently not for us.
This is probably good. If we had a reliable FTL signal link we could pretty trivially (using special relativity and things moving moderately fast) turn it into a future-to-past communication link and blow the hell out of causality. So far the only maybe-future-to-past comm channel that comes out of current paradigms (AFAIK) involves galactic-scale masses and energies.
Does that explanation help?
Parent
Re:Einstein's Bridge (Score:5, Funny)
Don't you mean Scyence Fyction?
Parent
Re:Einstein's Bridge (Score:5, Funny)
Aw, man, I just stopped crying about that. Why did you have to remind me?
I'll be in the corner in the fetal position, sucking my thumb, holding back tears and watching "Sci-Fi"-branded reruns of Star Trek if you need me.
Parent
Re:Einstein's Bridge (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Yeah, leave something like that to Hollywood. In the movie version, the LHC would travel back in time to kill its grandfather, but would miss instead killing the Tevatron. Hilarious shenanigans
or a car chase (probably both) would ensue.
Please just leave it as a book, if you like it.
Parent
Back in high school creative writing class ... (Score:5, Interesting)
... (some time between fall '63 and spring '65) I wrote a short story with a similar premise:
The government's physicists had identified a way to create such a "bounce" situation by a nuclear mumbo-jumbo that starts with putting together a dense enough energy packet. This backs the universe up a bit and it takes another alternative timeline. Humans have just enough psi to make different decisions. The more energy you use to start the process, the farther back the "time bounce" to the fork. Or at least that's the theory.
The government has taken advantage of this by creating a secret project: They are collecting and storing a LOT of energy using a solar power satellite. (The downlink is a laser and the ground-based collector and energy storage tech, like the details of the bounce device, are unspecified.) Accumulation of energy is ongoing, so they continue to have enough to bounce back at least to the time when the project was initiated. (Going farther risks taking a fork on which the device is not made.)
This is used by the diplomats as a way to correct mistakes: If things got too bad diplomatically they could go back and try something different. (Unlike a doomsday device you WANT to keep this one secret - and for there to be only one.)
Since the project went online, though there have been many conflicts and near-misses on situations with the potential to degenerate into something that would make WW II or a comet impact look tame, things have always worked out for the government in question. Sometimes by smart diplomacy, sometimes by smart battle strategy in small conflicts heading off large ones, sometimes by seemingly amazing coincidences and blind luck. Starting as one country on Earth (where the device is still sited) the government has (mostly peaceably) unified/absorbed/explored/grown into a multi-solar-system empire.
The kicker is that, from the viewpoint of the operators (from which it is was written) EVERY use is the FIRST use. It ALWAYS appears that things have miraculously gone so well that they haven't needed it - until JUST NOW. Maybe the thing really doesn't work - in which case it will destroy the planet and life on most of the spiral arm. Maybe it does work - but from the viewpoint of the current timeline it's just the end of the universe. Maybe the diplomats and generals, knowing this is a possibility, have gone to heroic efforts and pulled out heroic saves - until JUST NOW. But now it's finally hit the fan and the viewpoint characters have been ordered to set it off ...
One of the others in that class was the guy who was the model for Aahz in Asprin's books. Ran into him a decade or two later. He brought up the story and said it had haunted him ever since. B-)
Parent
Re:first! (Score:5, Funny)
even the mighty slashdot is speechless!
Apparently, several posts that came after yours traveled back through time to prevent you from being first.
Parent
Re:Almost... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it's just the guys running the simulation don't have any code to handle what we're doing with the LHC, so they keep tweaking things to break it while they work on a patch.
Parent
Re:Quantum Suidice (Score:5, Informative)
Well you could have just linked the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] instead of copying and pasting it ;)
Parent
Re:Boson in time (Score:5, Funny)
Well, ultimately I need to know if I'm buying any more cat food.
Parent