I’d been saving this story for a “Sunday Science” post, but Rich’s reporting of the latest problems with the Large Hadron Collider makes this too good to wait.
From the New York Times, about a month ago:
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…
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.
“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 In an unpublished essay, Dr.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.”
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.”
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.
It should be noted that there’s no time-travel paradox involved here. It would be like, instead of going back in time to murder your grandfather, you went back in time to save his life.
These scientists made a prediction that has been uncannily accurate so far. This collider really doesn’t seem to want to work…
The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is reported to be drafting a resolution bestowing its blessing on Higgs particles.
Good one, Lars. You gotta laugh, right?
I love symmetry – almost like we planned it Mike. When Pale Hose and Crimson Hose can come together, there is hope for peace in the middle east.
Believing, as I do, that: a) science brings us close to God, and b) God has a sense of humor, I suspect The Big Guy is having a supreme belly-laugh on us right about now. And just imagine if they do the “card drawing” exercise. If the result keeps coming up “shut me down” do you do it? I sure as hell would.
If it’s 100 million to one against, I’d do it in less than a heartbeat.
I believe a successful collision will at last reveal the secret of the thirteen herbs and spices in KFC chicken. And there ain’t no way the Colonel is letting that happen.
This must be why the “stimulus” hasn’t worked yet. Who knew?
I have it on good authority (I have an inside line to Schrodinger’s cat) that Maxwell’s demon has been secretly vandalizing the CERN facility.
Stosh,
I’m fairly certain Heisenberg is one of the principal members of the design and implementation team.
Those barely-disguised puns need a little more disguise, methinks.