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God is preventing this thing from working.
Now it'll go 3+ pages.
I figure this thread will go about 6 posts but for anyone following CERN its a good read.
Article.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle6879293.eceExplosions, scientists arrested for alleged terrorism, mysterious breakdown - recently Cern’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has begun to look like the world’s most ill-fated experiment.
Is it really nothing more than bad luck or is there something weirder at work? Such speculation generally belongs to the lunatic fringe, but serious scientists have begun to suggest that the frequency of Cern’s accidents and problems is far more than a coincidence.
The LHC, they suggest, may be sabotaging itself from the future — twisting time to generate a series of scientific setbacks that will prevent the machine fulfilling its destiny.
At first sight, this theory fits comfortably into the crackpot tradition linking the start-up of the LHC with terrible disasters. The best known is that the £3 billion particle accelerator might trigger a black hole capable of swallowing the Earth when it gets going. Scientists enjoy laughing at this one.
This time, however, their ridicule has been rather muted — because the time travel idea has come from two distinguished physicists who have backed it with rigorous mathematics.
What Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Ins ute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Ins ute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, are suggesting is that the Higgs boson, the particle that physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be “abhorrent to nature”.
What does that mean? According to Nielsen, it means that the creation of the boson at some point in the future would then ripple backwards through time to put a stop to whatever it was that had created it in the first place.
This, says Nielsen, could explain why the LHC has been hit by mishaps ranging from an explosion during construction to a second big bang that followed its start-up. Whether the recent arrest of a leading physicist for alleged links with Al-Qaeda also counts is uncertain.
Nielsen’s idea has been likened to that of a man traveling back through time and killing his own grandfather. “Our theory suggests that any machine trying to make the Higgs shall have bad luck,” he said.
“It is based on mathematics, but you could explain it by saying that God rather hates Higgs particles and attempts to avoid them.”
His warnings come at a sensitive time for Cern, which is about to make its second attempt to fire up the LHC. The idea is to accelerate protons to almost the speed of light around the machine’s 17-mile underground circular racetrack and then smash them together.
In theory the machine will create tiny replicas of the primordial “big bang” fireball thought to have marked the creation of the universe. But if Nielsen and Ninomiya are right, this latest build-up will inevitably get nowhere, as will those that come after — until eventually Cern abandons the idea altogether.
This is, of course, far from being the first science scare linked to the LHC. Over the years it has been the target of protests, wild speculation and court injunctions.
Fiction writers have naturally seized on the subject. In Angels and Demons, Dan Brown sets out a diabolical plot in which the Vatican City is threatened with annihilation from a bomb based on antimatter stolen from Cern.
Blasphemy, a novel from Douglas Preston, the bestselling science-fiction author, draws on similar themes, with a story about a mad physicist who wants to use a particle accelerator to communicate with God. The physicist may be American and the machine located in America, rather than Switzerland, but the links are clear.
Even Five, the TV channel, has got in on the act by screening FlashForward, an American series based on Robert Sawyer’s novel of the same name in which the start-up of the LHC causes the Earth’s population to black out for two minutes when they experience visions of their personal futures 21 years hence. This gives them a chance to change that future.
Scientists normally hate to see their ideas perverted and twisted by the ignorant, but in recent years many physicists have learned to welcome the way the LHC has become a part of popular culture. Cern even encourages film-makers to use the machine as a backdrop for their productions, often without charging them.
Nielsen presents them with a dilemma. Should they treat his suggestions as fact or fiction? Most would like to dismiss him, but his status means they have to offer some kind of science-based rebuttal.
James Gillies, a trained physicist who heads Cern’s communications department, said Nielsen’s idea was an interesting theory “but we know it doesn’t happen in reality”.
He explained that if Nielsen’s predictions were correct then whatever was stopping the LHC would also be stopping high-energy rays hitting the atmosphere. Since scientists can directly detect many such rays, “Nielsen must be wrong”, said Gillies.
He and others also believe that although such ideas have an element of fun, they risk distracting attention from the far more amazing ideas that the LHC will tackle once it gets going.
The Higgs boson, for example, is thought to give all other matter its mass, without which gravity could not work. If the LHC found the Higgs, it would open the door to solving all kinds of other mysteries about the origins and nature of matter. Another line of research aims to detect dark matter, which is thought to comprise about a quarter of the universe’s mass, but made out of a kind of particle that has so far proven impossible to detect.
However, perhaps the weirdest of all Cern’s aspirations for the LHC is to investigate extra dimensions of space. This idea, known as string theory, suggests there are many more dimensions to space than the four we can perceive.
At present these other dimensions are hidden, but smashing protons together in the LHC could produce gravitational anomalies, effectively tiny black holes, that would reveal their existence.
Some physicists suggest that when billions of pounds have been spent on the kit to probe such ideas, there is little need to invent new ones about time travel and self-sabotage.
History shows, however, it is unwise to dismiss too quickly ideas that are initially seen as science fiction. Peter Smith, a science historian and author of Doomsday Men, which looks at the links between science and popular culture, points out that what started as science fiction has often become the inspiration for big discoveries.
“Even the original idea of the ‘atomic bomb’ actually came not from scientists but from H G Wells in his 1914 novel The World Set Free,” he said.
“A scientist named Leo Szilard read it in 1932 and it gave him the inspiration to work out how to start the nuclear chain reaction needed to build a bomb. So the atom bomb has some of its origins in literature, as well as research.”
Some of Cern’s leading researchers also take Nielsen at least a little seriously. Brian Cox, professor of particle physics at Manchester University, said: “His ideas are theoretically valid. What he is doing is playing around at the edge of our knowledge, which is a good thing.
“He is pointing out that we don’t yet have a quantum theory of gravity, so we haven’t yet proved rigorously that sending information into the past isn’t possible.
“However, if time travelers do break into the LHC control room and pull the plug out of the wall, then I’ll refer you to my article supporting Nielsen’s theory that I wrote in 2025.”
This weekend, as the interest in his theories continued to grow, Nielsen was sounding more cautious. “We are seriously proposing the idea, but it is an ambitious theory, that’s all,” he said. “We already know it is not very likely to be true. If the LHC actually succeeds in discovering the Higgs boson, I guess we will have to think again.”
God is preventing this thing from working.
Now it'll go 3+ pages.
Pure gold.“However, if time travelers do break into the LHC control room and pull the plug out of the wall, then I’ll refer you to my article supporting Nielsen’s theory that I wrote in 2025.”
I was trying to keep from going there.
Isn't it.
anybody seen the pope lately?
Damn
You are correct, sir.
That's what they get for ing with mother nature. Rumor has it that thing is powered by...not one...not even two...but THREE Three Wolf Moon t-shirts. Scary .
My first thought was "Cheeky monkey!"
Nice article; I love that it mentions Leo Szilard; "President Truman Didn't Understand" is another great read if anyone is interested.
because a forth would have opened up the parallel universes.
it would really be interesting to see if the theory on being able to peer at other dimemsions pans out. i assume we would record these dimensions as we can not actually physically see them (unless you happen to be picasso).
hmm. i thought i read this thing was a bust when it broke last year or whenever.
If the Higgs Boson is traveling back in time to interfere with itself and ultimately destroy itself, how could it be "there" to travel back in time in the first place?
Steven Hawking explained all of this when he wrote The Terminator.
time travel and explosions.....something far more important here...
Hey, Ginobili's Bald Spot, are those big naturals in your sig?
Whats more interesting to me right now besides the possibility of Finding the higgs Boson is the project that MIGHT be running alongside of it for testing the possibility of a true Hyperdrive propulsion engine that could get us to a sizable fraction of the speed of light. The testing wont affect the LHC's main focus at all.
http://pda.physorg.com/_news174293159.html
(PhysOrg.com) -- The world's most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), could be used to test the principles behind hyperdrive, a possible future form of spacecraft propulsion that could drive spacecraft at a good fraction of the speed of light.
The idea of a hyperdrive propulsion system arises from the work of an influential German mathematician, David Hilbert, in the 1920s. Hilbert studied the interactions between a stationary mass and a relativistic particle moving away from it. He calculated that if the particle was moving faster than around half the speed of lightm an inertial, distant observer would see the particle as being repelled by the mass.
Now a physicist in the U.S., Franklin Felber, has taken Hilbert's almost forgotten proposal and reversed it, calculating the repulsion should be mutual, with relativistic particles also repelling the stationary mass. Felber suggests this hypervelocity propulsion could be used to propel a stationary mass to a sizeable proportion of the speed of light.
Felber likens the idea to an elastic collision between two objects of very different mass. If a heavy mass collides with a light stationary mass, the lighter mass rebounds at around twice the speed of the larger mass. In the hypervelocity propulsion drive a relativistic particle would repel a stationary mass at a speed greater than its own.
Felber has also suggested his theory could be tested in the LHC, since it will be able to accelerate particles sufficiently to generate the repulsive force. Felber wants to install a resonant test mass beside the particle beam line inside the LHC and measure the tiny forces produced in it by the accelerated particles passing by. The mass would not interfere with the beam, and hence would not disrupt the LHC's normal operations.
The LHC, near Geneva in Switzerland, is the largest and highest energy particle accelerator in the world. It is built in a three-meter-wide circular tunnel 50-175 meters underground and 27 kilometers in diameter. It is designed to accelerate particles and smash them together to help scientists test the predictions of particle physics. It can send a particle through the 27 km ring at 99.99% of the speed of light.
If the LHC cannot be used, Felber suggests the idea could be tested at the Tevatron particle accelerator at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. Until the LHC resumes operation, this is still the highest energy particle accelerator in operation, but since the energy is smaller than at LHC, the forces produced would also be smaller.
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