The Large Hadron Collider and God
This... is very interesting. I thought it deserved its own thread. Major parts highlighted for those too lazy to read it all.
The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate
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What do you all think? Are we at a crossroads here, on the verge of discovering something that man is not meant to discover? Or are physicists being too crazy, even for physicists, and in need of being more skeptical of an 18 mile fucking track of superpowered magnets?
The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate
More than a year after an explosion of sparks, soot and frigid helium shut it down, the world’s biggest and most expensive physics experiment, known as the Large Hadron Collider, is poised to start up again. In December, if all goes well, protons will start smashing together in an underground racetrack outside Geneva in a search for forces and particles that reigned during the first trillionth of a second of the Big Bang.
Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No, 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.
Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, put this idea forward in a series of papers with titles like “Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal” and “Search for Future Influence From LHC,” posted on the physics Web site arXiv.org in the last year and a half.
According to the so-called Standard Model that rules almost all physics, the Higgs is responsible for imbuing other elementary particles with mass.
“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail message. In an unpublished essay, Dr. Nielson said of the theory, “Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.” It is their guess, he went on, “that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”
This malign influence from the future, they argue, could explain why the United States Superconducting Supercollider, also designed to find the Higgs, was canceled in 1993 after billions of dollars had already been spent, an event so unlikely that Dr. Nielsen calls it an “anti-miracle.”
You might think that the appearance of this theory is further proof that people have had ample time — perhaps too much time — to think about what will come out of the collider, which has been 15 years and $9 billion in the making.
The collider was built by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, to accelerate protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts around an 18-mile underground racetrack and then crash them together into primordial fireballs.
For the record, as of the middle of September, CERN engineers hope to begin to collide protons at the so-called injection energy of 450 billion electron volts in December and then ramp up the energy until the protons have 3.5 trillion electron volts of energy apiece and then, after a short Christmas break, real physics can begin.
Maybe.
Dr. Nielsen and Dr. Ninomiya started laying out their case for doom in the spring of 2008. It was later that fall, of course, after the CERN collider was turned on, that a connection between two magnets vaporized, shutting down the collider for more than a year.
Dr. Nielsen called that “a funny thing that could make us to believe in the theory of ours.”
He agreed that skepticism would be in order. After all, most big science projects, including the Hubble Space Telescope, have gone through a period of seeming jinxed. At CERN, the beat goes on: Last weekend the French police arrested a particle physicist who works on one of the collider experiments, on suspicion of conspiracy with a North African wing of Al Qaeda.
Dr. Nielsen and Dr. Ninomiya have proposed a kind of test: that CERN engage in a game of chance, a “card-drawing” exercise using perhaps a random-number generator, in order to discern bad luck from the future. If the outcome was sufficiently unlikely, say drawing the one spade in a deck with 100 million hearts, the machine would either not run at all, or only at low energies unlikely to find the Higgs.
Sure, it’s crazy, and CERN should not and is not about to mortgage its investment to a coin toss. The theory was greeted on some blogs with comparisons to Harry Potter. But craziness has a fine history in a physics that talks routinely about cats being dead and alive at the same time and about anti-gravity puffing out the universe.
As Niels Bohr, Dr. Nielsen’s late countryman and one of the founders of quantum theory, once told a colleague: “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”
Dr. Nielsen is well-qualified in this tradition. He is known in physics as one of the founders of string theory and a deep and original thinker, “one of those extremely smart people that is willing to chase crazy ideas pretty far,” in the words of Sean Carroll, a Caltech physicist and author of a coming book about time, “From Eternity to Here.”
Another of Dr. Nielsen’s projects is an effort to show how the universe as we know it, with all its apparent regularity, could arise from pure randomness, a subject he calls “random dynamics.”
Dr. Nielsen admits that he and Dr. Ninomiya’s new theory smacks of time travel, a longtime interest, which has become a respectable research subject in recent years. While it is a paradox to go back in time and kill your grandfather, physicists agree there is no paradox if you go back in time and save him from being hit by a bus. In the case of the Higgs and the collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus. Although just why the Higgs would be a catastrophe is not clear. If we knew, presumably, we wouldn’t be trying to make one.
We always assume that the past influences the future. But that is not necessarily true in the physics of Newton or Einstein. According to physicists, all you really need to know, mathematically, to describe what happens to an apple or the 100 billion galaxies of the universe over all time are the laws that describe how things change and a statement of where things start. The latter are the so-called boundary conditions — the apple five feet over your head, or the Big Bang.
The equations work just as well, Dr. Nielsen and others point out, if the boundary conditions specify a condition in the future (the apple on your head) instead of in the past, as long as the fundamental laws of physics are reversible, which most physicists believe they are.
“For those of us who believe in physics,” Einstein once wrote to a friend, “this separation between past, present and future is only an illusion.”
In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel “Sirens of Titan,” all of human history turns out to be reduced to delivering a piece of metal roughly the size and shape of a beer-can opener to an alien marooned on Saturn’s moon so he can repair his spaceship and go home.
Whether the collider has such a noble or humble fate — or any fate at all — remains to be seen. As a Red Sox fan my entire adult life, I feel I know something about jinxes.
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What do you all think? Are we at a crossroads here, on the verge of discovering something that man is not meant to discover? Or are physicists being too crazy, even for physicists, and in need of being more skeptical of an 18 mile fucking track of superpowered magnets?
Comments
I still say we're good to go, keep pushing forward.
Step 1: Complete and run with the LHC because these guys are fruits with too much time on their hands. They're just being silly.
Step 2: ????
Step 3: Profit.
(Step 4: Use Profit to revive and complete Superconducting Supercollider)
(Step 5: Use SCSC to form black hole and destroy us all.)
The argument of boundary conditions allowing future events to affect the past (and its attempts to legitimize itself by name-dropping Newton and Einstein) are tenuous at best. It is no longer assumed in most respected circles that one can know everything that ever happened or will happened by knowing all current data and simply hitting rewind/fast-forward. Quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle prevent us from knowing any such information in such a manner.
Let me play devil's advocate a bit. We as humans used to know that thunderstorms were caused by angry gods, and we used to know that throwing a beautiful virgin girl down a volcano was the best way to ensure a good harvest for the year. We've known that the earth was flat, and we've known that everything in the universe revolves around us.
What I'm trying to say is, how do we know now that we are right? For thousands of years we've been certain that we've known how the world, and the universe, works. What's different now?
As we humans have progressed and learned, well, we've gained a lot of definite knowledge. We KNOW Newton's laws, we KNOW quantum laws for 'god's' sake.
My point is that now, we have some form of CONFIDENCE, and not only that, but real, factual, tested, provable ASSURANCE of how things like this tend work.
The easiest way to work this out is Occam's Razor. What is more plausible, what makes more sense? That the Higgs is somehow not meant to be found, experienced, known of, and if so doesn't that basically give us evidence that it exists anyways? Or that there have been a series of unfortunate but unrelated events temporarily barring our enormous particle collider?
EDIT: If they are going to try to suggest stuff like this they should at least put forth something that at least seems slightly closer to being possible like that the LHC produced some sort of temporal disturbance that damaged the LHC before it even produced it that first time. Still sound like an episode of Star Trek, but at least it's not magic/god.
Again, this brings us to today. Isn't it possible, even just a little, that the evidence for some completely new style of thinking is right in front of us, but we are simply misinterpreting it or not seeing it in its entirety? It's not that I am valiantly defending the wacky idea of time traveling Higgs bosons preventing the universe from being metaphorically hit by a bus (even though it is a little awesome), it's that I am more skeptical of the knee jerk reactions of scientists who say "We're right, fuck you".
The scientists who proposed this idea even proposed an experiment to see if the future is trying to fuck with us. It's up there in the article, they want to set up that random number generator and give it a trillion-to-one or so odds of picking one specific number or selection, like a single spade a giant deck of hearts. If there is some sort of external force up until now unidentified by current physics models trying to stop intelligent life from discovering something, then it may actually force this test to go its way. The very fact that some others in the community are hesitant to do this implies that they themselves are thinking, at least in the back of their minds, what if...? The odds are about the same that scientists give the LHC for creating earth destroying black holes and strangelets and all that, so they might as well add in a voluntary LHC shutdown to a one-in-trillion shot too.
Is the LHC being affected by weird forces from the future? Probably not. Are people making a big deal about nothing when in reality billions of dollars worth of impossibly powerful and precise magnets spanning 18 miles in length may not all work perfectly right out of the box? Probably. But I'm still keeping an open mind. After all, physicists themselves say that if you think you understand quantum mechanics, then you don't understand quantum mechanics. There is much we still don't know yet.
What makes the Higgs boson so abhorrent, exactly? The fact that we haven't yet created one? This whole thing doesn't seem to be worth the time we're investing in arguing about it. Let the LHC be used for real science, don't clog it up with woo.
Ryan, what you're talking about definitely does happen. The scientific community is incredibly stubborn in changing things that they believe they "know", but this time, I believe they're still right. A good example is the development of the theory of dark matter and energy. For the longest time, evidence supporting it was ignored. Even now that it's an accepted theory, we haven't found any direct evidence that supports it, we've never found dark matter. Other theories have begun to pop up, but those were also ignored for the longest time.
It's not completely baseless. It's based on extrapolations of known physics. Black holes are the exception here, but they were hypothesized in the same manner before any evidence of their existence had ever been observed.
Here... eh, not so much. What could possible happen if we found the Higgs? we'd know something unknowable? We know knowledge like this isn't a tangible thing, and therefore cannot be measured in anything but its signals in the brain, which aren't interpreted by their wavelength so much as which neurons they pass through and are sent to. Even more mysterious is how something like a particle would pass through time (which DOES make sense) and then somehow change the time line so it isn't found (which DOESN'T.) How would this or any other particle find the Higgs about to be found in the vastness of space? How can it pick and choose events to prevent us from finding it? The only explanation would be some alien race out there manipulating things from beyond time, and those are not physics.
mind=blown
And why don't dogs fly, then? 'Cause everyone knows all dogs go to heaven.
I can accept rocks being inherently sinful, though. Smug fuckers, think they're better than me.
I shall put forth the "some people are dicks" theory and suggest that someone simply threw the piece of bread over the fence simply because it was there and they could.