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Science

Large Hadron Collider is a Time Machine? 332

Posted by CmdrTaco 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."
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Large Hadron Collider is a Time Machine? More

Large Hadron Collider is a Time Machine?

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  • Testable! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by proverbialcow ( 177020 ) on Thursday March 17, 2011 @10:08AM (#35516062) Journal
    So, when it did already cause matter to have appeared?

  • so that what triggering the earthquakes now days under ground time travel.

  • No paradoxes? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mangu ( 126918 ) on Thursday March 17, 2011 @10:14AM (#35516160)

    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?

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

    • 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?

      Just hope that someone else doesn't send a message back in time to kill the horse.

    • 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 [homeunix.net].

      • There is an aspect which I am curious about:
        carrying information.

        I have understood in some of the screwing-around-with-the-speed-of-light research that while they can make signals look like they are departing from the C speed limit, it turns out that no information is transferable in these unusual cases. (EG - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light#Phase_velocities_above_c [wikipedia.org] )

        The differentiation between a headline saying 'X is faster than light!!1!' and info about actual signal transfer can be non-in

      • Here's what I would do if I could send messages to the past:

        I'd build a web proxy server that would store all sent http requests for a configuable period of time and then send them out to the internet at that time. Responses would then be sent back in time to me.

        Given enough memory for storing my web requests, this would let me browse the web of the future. Sending messages to the future is merely storing them on the hard drive for later retrieval.

        Anyway, I'd use my advantage to win the lotto, play the

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ledow ( 319597 )

      By killing X, there would be no need to send the message, hence no reason to send (or memory of promising to send) the results backwards, which means no incentive to ever do anything that someone in the future asks you to do based on a promise of future knowledge.

      And nobody says that time is linear. We just don't know. We assume so, because of the way we perceive it (but we also only perceive it "forwards" and that might not be true either), but we don't know. Maybe it would create an instantaneous alter

      • For some reason your comment reminded me of The Doctor: "People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff."
    • Wow! And all along I've been blaming the dog for the voices I heard telling me to kill! kill! kill!

      Now I know it was in fact Higgs singlet messages being sent from the future!

    • On top of that, we can ALREADY send messages to the future. In fact, we've been doing it for millenia... :-)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jez9999 ( 618189 )

      Wait, wait, wait.

      If it will be possible to send messages to the past, then in the future we would have managed it. That would mean we'd be receiving messages now (or who knows, hundreds of years ago) so we'd know they will succeed. As we're not receiving messages now, they mustn't have succeeded... or they must have decided not to use it. Or they're sending the messages but we don't have the tech to decode them. :-)

      Hmm, I wonder if they can send a message to Japan in 2000 to tell them to decommission Fuk

  • So who is this Higgs bozo and how in hell's name did he lose his singlet yesterday before he even got it?

  • Am I the only one (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Xacid ( 560407 ) on Thursday March 17, 2011 @10:18AM (#35516212) Journal

    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.

    • 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.

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

      • 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.

    • 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.

    • 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.

      So stop partying with theoretical physicists who know all the possible scenarios where time-travel is possible, and start partying with engineers who know it's next to impossible to us to apply those scenarios.

      • Exactly. Watched a TV prog on methods for time travel. One method was to take an infinitely dense disk and spin it at infinite speeds and walk the circumference against the spin I think.


        The short of it - there are no possible scenarios.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      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, reall

  • Ah, a headline that is a question. Classic Cavuto move.

    Can't remember who said this...
    "If the answer to your headline can be summarized as 'No', then don't print it."

    -d

  • Pseudo science FTW! (Score:3)

    by theendlessnow ( 516149 ) * on Thursday March 17, 2011 @10:27AM (#35516366)

    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.

  • Just wait until yesterday, it will have been!

  • 88mph? (Score:5, Funny)

    by gravos ( 912628 ) on Thursday March 17, 2011 @10:30AM (#35516418) Homepage

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

  • Anyone know of any Sci-Fi where people are freely able to send messages across time? It would require a multiverse to avoid violating causality, similar to the John Titor story, and it would be impossible to send messages to any time before the machine was powered on. Imagine if you could email yourself or others across time by relaying an email through a "temporal router." What a crazy world that would be.

  • From TFA:

    "One of the attractive things about this approach to time travel is that it avoids all the big paradoxes," Weiler said. "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."

    How does this avoid paradoxes? A scientist sends a message back in time "Kill my father". Past performs the deed. Paradox opened.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by ledow ( 319597 )

      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, ev

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by MistrX ( 1566617 )

        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?

    • Was just about to ask the same question. Had it half way typed out and saw this one sitting right at the bottom.

    • These guys have obviously never heard of John Titor.

  • Ain't possible.

    It may produce events that represent possible/probable past events. A representation of past events is not TimeTravel.

  • The article says:

    In 2007, the researchers, along with Vanderbilt graduate fellow James Dent, posted a paper titled "Neutrino time travel" on the preprint server that generated a considerable amount of buzz.

    They did indeed post it [arxiv.org] in 2007. But where was the buzz generated? As far as I can tell, that paper has never been cited, not even in another arXiv preprint. I can't even find evidence of it being discussed on mailing lists or blogs, at least anything [google.com] Google knows [google.com] about, prior to the current bit of public

  • Yawn (Score:3)

    by jd2112 ( 1535857 ) on Thursday March 17, 2011 @10:52AM (#35516692)
    Wake me when the headlines read "LHC researcher wins multiple lotteries".
  • Here is the easy message: it is not a theory - a way to do many calculations, all confirmed by experimental tests. People who work on M-Theory hope it becomes a theory some day. Even us folks on the ultra-conservative fringe of physics (http://bit.ly/GEMblog) would not publish such silliness.

    Be a real man, woman, or pre-op tranny and buy the "No Stinkin Higgs" t-shirt (http://bit.ly/GEMtshirt) that predicts, well, that they will not find the Higgs or some time-traveling singlet.

    Doug
    http://visualphysics

  • Just wait till someone with enough money decides that would be profitable to invest on building such machines to know how high will be stock market next week.
  • Where did that picture get taken that's in the article??? At the local strip mall? They need to go back in time and alter the decision to print that.
  • If it is possible to send information back in time, that results in paradoxes of its own. Consider:

    Our universe contains some quantity of information. Let's call that quantity (x).

    Now, some information comes from the future at the LHC. Our universe now contains more information than it did before. Let's call that quantity (x)+n

    Finally, the moment that extra information came from arrives. Now our universe contains (x+n)-n, or x amount of information again - but for that brief period, our universe co

  • I can believe it. It certainly looks like Tom Weiler has traveled back in time, seeing that sweater tied around his neck.

  • About sending information back in time...

    To paraphrase Fermi,
    If this theory is true, why haven't we done so already?

  • Someone is tinkering with the timeline. And it's someone from a period +- 50 yrs Current time. They're trying to produce outcomes that bear on our current geopolitical status. There are changes embedded in ancient periods:

    The mother culture of Central America:
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2001/caraltrans.shtml [bbc.co.uk]

    Massive civilization in Amazonian Basin:
    http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/11/081119-lost-cities-amazon.html [nationalgeographic.com]

    There are better-known examples closer to Europe, and more modern: the A

  • Maybe that's why the planet is getting all upset - a 2m continent shift isn't peanuts.
  • The Future: A first post, stamping on an article, forever.

  • To The Future (Score:3)

    by The_Dougster ( 308194 ) on Friday March 18, 2011 @12:51PM (#35532020) Homepage

    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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