Scientists claim LHC is being sabotaged from the future

[JoeBentley]

Link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/s...wn-future.html

Forget the far-fetched belief that it will create a black hole, two distinguished physicists have gone even further claiming nature itself is stopping the troubled £4.4billion project from getting off the ground.

In a theory reminiscent of the time travelling film Back to the Future, the theoretical physicists Holger Nielsen, from Denmark, and Masao Ninomiya, from Japan, have concluded that its discoveries could be so "abhorrent to nature" that they are coming back to stop their own creation

[mags]

They have come up with a theory that it will "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.

"It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen said.

He said that his theories may even provide a "model for God" who "rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them”.

It's exceedingly frightening to me that a preeminent scientist could say that last phrase, unless it was in jest. Actually basing scientific papers on these "theories" is shocking.

Is there a good word for the opposite of a Renaissance? Because I am really beginning to think it is what we are entering.

[Beejtronic]

I have to admit, when the LHC broke a while ago, my first thought was, "Good 'ol Doctor!"

[ganzfeld]

Unfortunately, the cyborg sent back in time to stop the evil machine threatening the future of mankind has instead decided to become Governor of California.

[Silas Sparkhammer]

Hans Moravec deals with this, a bit, in "The Limits to Computation," in his book "Mind Children: the future of robot and human intelligence." Basically, he describes experiments which can have two outcomes: a success, which produces a print-out with an answer on it, and a failure, which destroys the cosmos.

Oddly enough, the experiment always succeeds.

But a variant of the experiment, which is flawed, and which always would fail -- never actually functions properly. A small but vital piece of the apparatus always burns out, or some other malfunction causes the process to abort.

This is what I have called "The Ultimate Anthropic Principle." In the multiple-worlds interpretation, we can only perceive those universes which have not been destroyed.

(In much the same way, we live in a world where the Cuban Missile Crisis didn't get fumbled, even though it was little short of a miracle that civilization survived. This is because most of us, in those worlds, are dead, and thus do not have a point-of-view.)

If we lack the many-worlds interpretation, then we operate under different constraints. The end of the world is possible. One day, we're here: the next day...............

However, time-travel is very difficult to make sense of if you don't also have a many-worlds time topology. The grandfather paradox and the epistemological paradox are almost impossible to work around.

And, while I don't think that a black-hole event, even if it devours the earth, is energetic enough to create backwards-in-time shock waves to prevent itself from happening, a "Higgs event," perhaps triggering a new phase of cosmic inflation, or even an entire new Big Bang, just might be so vastly energetic as to throw such shock waves into its own past.

Silas (But I'm betting on ordinary Bob Clampett style gremlins!)

[Silas Sparkhammer]

Originally Posted by mags

It's exceedingly frightening to me that a preeminent scientist could say that last phrase, unless it was in jest. Actually basing scientific papers on these "theories" is shocking.

Is there a good word for the opposite of a Renaissance? Because I am really beginning to think it is what we are entering.

Perhaps it was in jest. Another thought is that it is wild speculation, and I think there is a place in legitimate science for weird-headed stuff like that. It isn't something to take too seriously, but if it can be modeled mathematically, well, why not? What's best of all is that the idea makes a concrete prediction: Higgs-event experiments will always have bad luck. That's pretty straightforward, and definitely testable.

Where we would be at a threat of "dark ages" thinking is if he seriously argued that we should abandon high-energy physics experiments because they are dangerous, solely on the basis of the technological difficulties seen so far. If a piece of equipment breaks, and he seriously argued, "We need to stop, now, because we're being given a meaningful sign," then I'd join with you in condemning him as a cluck, churl, and clod-headed medievalist.

But just saying, thoughtfully, "It could be a signal travelling backward in time" isn't a sin. Because, after all, it could be!

Silas (and anti-protons might fly out of my -- ah -- donkey)

[ARubberChickenWithAPulley]

Fascinating theories.

Of course, it seems much more likely that this is just an incredibly complex project that, like most incredibly complex projects, didn't go exactly as planned.

The Hubble, after all, had a major flaw when it was put into service as well. I would have been more surprised if it had worked perfectly from the get-go.

[Silas Sparkhammer]

Originally Posted by ARubberChickenWithAPulley

. . . Of course, it seems much more likely that this is just an incredibly complex project that, like most incredibly complex projects, didn't go exactly as planned. . . .

You must have shaved with Occam's Razor this morning!

Silas (drains pasta with the sieve of Eratosthenes...)