Killing your own grandfather before you're born

[sleigh]

Now this is interesting...

It seems that there are a few physicists out there who are advancing a theory that the CERN supercollider will once again fail -- because it must. Y'see, the Higgs boson, which the supercollider is designed to eventually produce and study, "might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it [can] make one."

Talk about your time travel paradoxes...

The proponents of the theory, Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, argue that this may also be why, after billions of dollars spent in development, the US Superconducting Supercollider was scrapped in 1993 -- its own future reached back into the past and shut down the funding.

The CERN supercollider is scheduled to resume operations at the end of this year after its magnet meltdown back in 2008. So maybe we'll find out that this theory is wrong when CERN works flawlessly and begins to produce collisions and results. Or will it?

There must be an sf story in there somewhere. :-)

Comments

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

John Cramer used the concept, or something similar, in his novel Einstein's Bridge.

[cathshaffer.livejournal.com]

I love this. If you read deeply enough into physics, it gets very weird. Always makes me wonder about stubborn materialists who insist there is no evidence of God, when reality itself is so hard to understand.

[octoberdreaming.livejournal.com]

I think Robert Sawyer used a premise similar to this in his novel FlashForward, but I can't say for certain because I haven't read it, just read about its subject. I must pick up a copy soon. I did hear that the new tv show based on Sawyer's book switched the physicist protagonists for FBI agents. :(

I know that you and your readers are probably not taking this seriously, but I do want to give a little more information about this, since the NYT article seems to edge towards validating this idea rather than pointing out the bad science involved.

The "paper" - if it can be called that - by Nielsen and Ninomiya has taken a lot of (well-deserved) flack from the quantum physics community. It's badly written, and no scientific paper should ever, EVER use "luck" as part of its argument. Bad, bad science. I don't think the article was ever received in a peer-reviewed journal; it was only submitted to arXiv, which is an unreviewed archive for "preprints" of papers.

There's some speculation as to whether Nielsen and Ninomiya put the paper up as a joke; some people say they did, some say they didn't and point to a couple of other papers by the two that run along the same lines.

I'm just going to throw down a few pertinent links here.

The original paper: Test of Influence from Future in Large Hadron Collider; A Proposal (http://arxiv.org/abs/0802.2991)
A snarky (but fair!!) analysis of the paper (http://dorigo.wordpress.com/2007/07/21/respectable-physicists-gone-crackpotty/)
Higgs Hates Us? - commentary on the NYT article from "Built on Facts" (http://scienceblogs.com/builtonfacts/2009/10/higgs_hates_us.php)

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

Nice links, and thanks. It'll be interesting to see if this is actually an example of physicist humor or not.

[lizziebelle.livejournal.com]

FlashForward (the book) did feature CERN, the supercollider, and the Higgs Boson, but did not involve travelling backward in time to prevent the experiment. I wonder, though, if these guys got their idea from the book?

[barbarienne.livejournal.com]

Becasue none of this suggests that there´s a magical sky-fairy making it all happen. All the evidence suggests is that the universe is weird. But we knew that already. The fun is in finding out just howweird.

[barbarienne.livejournal.com]

As long as it doesn´t send back a cyborg to kill everyone involved in building it, I think it will be okay.

[cathshaffer.livejournal.com]

So the existence of God is something to scoff at (magic sky fairy), but the Higgs boson traveling in time to prevent its own creation is plausible? Got it.

[barbarienne.livejournal.com]

The Higgs boson traveling in time to prevent its own creation is hilarious. I don´t expect it to turn out to be true.

[cathshaffer.livejournal.com]

Oh, okay. I'm glad that's settled. You should write a note to Drs. Nielsen and Ninomiya to tell them about how funny you think their theories are. Be sure to include all of your physics credentials so that they take you seriously.

[braider.livejournal.com]

That was my reaction when my coworker told me about it. That, or that the person with the theory had been up too late the night before reading an SF novel...

[cfgwebgeek.livejournal.com]

Not so much a theory, it seems, as a rationale. But I sense a Naval theme: could there be a boson's mate lurking somewhere?

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

Arrrrr, matey!

[barbarienne.livejournal.com]

(With apologies to sleigh for possibly turning this thread into something he would rather not have in his blog)

Nielsen and Ninomiya are disagreed with by other, equally respected, physicists. Shall we throw them all in a pit with knives and let them battle it out?

Further, it's pretty clear when you read their papers that they themselves don't really think the story is credible--they're having a little fun with the creative speculations that the mathematics imply. It's the NYTimes writer of the article who goes running with that notion for the sake of making the story interesting.

It's bad science reporting, not bad science. And it's still hilarious.

[cathshaffer.livejournal.com]

They are taking an outlandish hypothesis and proposing a real-world experiment to test it. I think it's brilliant. And I do not think there's anything wrong with the science reporting. You can't blame the writers if people only read the headlines and the first two sentences.