Wednesday, October 14, 2009

That strange feeling is your head spinning.

Is The Large Hadron Collider Being Sabotaged from the Future?

The quest to observe the Higgs boson has certainly been plagued by its share of troubles, from the cancellation of the Superconducting Supercollider in 1993 to the Large Hadron Collider's streak of technical troubles. In fact, the projects have suffered such bad luck that Holger Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto wonder if it isn't bad luck at all, but future influences rippling back to sabotage them. In papers like "Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal" and "Search for Future Influence From LHC," they put forth the notion that observing the Higgs boson would be such an abhorrent event that the future is actually trying to prevent it from happening.


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12 comments:

Particleion said...

The plot thickens a while back fermilab received this strange letter
http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/fnalcodelettersmall.jpg

So strange that it turned to the public to help crack the code... the original call for help is located here.

http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/2008/05/15/code-crackers-wanted/

Still has not been cracked from what I know...(cue X files theme song)

Justin said...

Reminds me of the SF novel "Einstein's Bridge". Long story short, the Superconducting Supercollider is actually built, but it alerts evil aliens from another dimension to our existence. Good aliens show up, and using time travel, manipulate the time line via political maneuvers so that the SSC is never built, and everyone lives happily ever after. Or something like that. It's been a while since I read it.

http://www.amazon.ca/Einsteins-Bridge-John-Cramer/dp/0380788314

mckibillo said...

It's a cute idea, but doesn't it imply that the concerned folks from the future are so concerned because they've experienced the horrible effects of having seen the Higgs boson? Can't be too bad... they're still around and they got to develop time travel to boot. Besides, it begs the question why anyone would want to delete their own timeline? Or particularly care for the well being of another one...? It's not like they're going to intersect.

Tristan Eldritch said...

I'm not one to appeal to Occam's razor normally, but......this one makes me feel like going Freddy Kruger on it!

Red Pill Junkie said...

I use the same theory to explain why women won't go on a date with me :-P

Anonymous said...

If people from the future are visiting us to repair things they've done a pretty horrible job so far.

Anonymous said...

I understand how to get to the future (by time dilation), but how do you get from the future to the past?

Stan

purrlgurrl said...

What continues to remain unclear to me is why billions of brain cells and billions of dollars (er, euros) are being spent on this wild goose chase. Beyond the rhetoric about expanding our knowledge of the cosmos and blah, blah, blah, what exactly is the payoff? In real terms, I mean. Something commercializable? A weapon even more horrific than the ones we’ve already developed that Europeans can have the bragging rights to?

Yeah, yeah, I know a lot of high tech companies got terrific paydays out of building the collider, and a lot of otherwise unemployable eggheads are also seeing some nice paychecks for daydreaming on someone else’s dime. I suppose these are reasons enough in themselves.

Given the prevalence of disease, hunger, poverty, ignorance and now the threat of global warming, to devote so many resources to this is beyond immoral. If the future can put a stop to this lunacy, maybe there really is a God.

Anonymous said...

The LHC's cost is less than 7 billion dollars. The cost is shared by 20 different countries, primarily the 6 main sponsors. It has been 30 years in the design and construction. The U.S. share of cost is less than $1 billion.

It is intended to find out if the Higgs boson exists, which is a theorized fundamental particle predicted by the Standard Model, which may give all other particles their mass. The LHC is expected to provide new scientific data on such issues as supersymmetry, gravity, string theory, extra dimensions, dark matter and energy, and other unknown phenomena which may provide a foundation for and better information about answering some of the fundamental questions of quantum mechanics, relativity, and the nature of reality.

For comparison costs, the LHC costs less than 4 B-2 bombers. Less than 2 months of the Afghanistan war. Less than 1% of the U.S. domestic economic stimulus package.

There will always be things like "disease, hunger, poverty, ignorance and now the threat of global warming" that call for massive funding, far, far beyond the cost of the LHC. But is the LHC, in terms of cost vs. potential scientific benefit either "beyond immoral," unethical, or lunacy? I don't think so. To not fund, at this relatively low cost, basic science and research into the physics of the nature of reality would be, IMHO, the unethical, immoral, or lunatic thing to do.

It is also possible that better determining, through this kind of experimentation, the underlying structures of matter and energy, of the cosmos itself, may also eventually provide technologies that could better advance and help humanity deal with some of the essential problems noted above. We don't know what we might find unless we look. To not look or try to find would be the greater failure and loss to humanity.

Anonymous said...

It is the quest to find G-d.
I personally think they are looking in the wrong place. They should just try smoking some Salvia. Its very cheap and much safer.
That aside, this is pure research. It produces knowledge. From knowledge, many things can come.

Stan

Anonymous said...

The US is responsible for at least 40% of military spending worldwide. And then whine about LHC?

http://www.globalissues.org/article/75/world-military-spending
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States

shaun said...

Who's to say it's "people" from the future, and not the universe itself?