Is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) being sabotaged from the future?
What do you think about this article?
What if all the Large Hadron Collider’s recent woes are more than bad luck and technical problems? Two noted physicists speculate that the future may be pushing back on the LHC to avert the disaster of observing the Higgs boson.
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.
“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 In an unpublished essay, Dr.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.”
Nielsen and Ninomiya recognize that the theory sounds pretty crazy and that other projects involving a lot of delicate technology — such as the Hubble Telescope — have gone through their own periods of apparent bad luck. But their theory — wild as it is — is situated in current research in theoretical physics and time travel. If the observation of the Higgs boson would result in calamity, they claim it isn’t outside the realm of possibility that someone from our future might exert influence on our time to stop it:
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.
http://io9.com/5380647/is-the-large-hadron-collider-being-sabotaged-from-the-future
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38 Answers
And yet, say the “Face” on Mars is artificial and you’re the crazy one.
yes it would be a paradox
if you went back in time to save your grandfather there would be no reason anymore to go back in time to save him, would there?
the same with the “interference from the future to prevent discovery of the higgs boson” hypothesis. when you prevent it from happening, there is no reason anymore to go back to prevent it.
@ragingloli it wouldn’t be a paradaox. You wouldn’t go back in time to save you grandfather because he wouldn’t need saving because he has to have survived the bus thing for you to exist. You would go back in time for some other reason and save him by accident and you would still go back in time because the original reason (whatever it was) for going back in time would still be there.
PersonallyI find it much easier just to ignore quantum physicists.
@Lightlyseared
You would go back in time for some other reason and save him by accident and you would still go back in time because the original reason (whatever it was) for going back in time would still be there.
Chaos Theory.
There is no guarantee that your interference with the timeline would not also eliminate the initial reason for you travelling back in time.
The key to the paradox is you are here.
Even if you went back in time to kill your father.
Only to find out he was not the sperm donor or you were not able to kill him.
In any case.
The events in history that brought you to you being here would still apply.
Because you are a product of past events.
That really is a wild idea. I heard a story on NPR this morning that said that the effort to produce the particle might have been sucessful but the particle managed to travel back in time to anihilate itself. Even that story seemed odd, but going from the quantum to the macro level jumps another quantum level of weirdness.
@ragingloli you’re wrong. Chaos theory has nothing to do with this. There is every certainity that your interference with the time line will lead you travelling back in time because the very fact that you exist in the present to travel back in time is due to the fact that you travelled back in time to save your grandfather. If you hadn’t saved him you wouldn’t exist so save him, so the very fact you are in the present means that you will travel back in time. This is what Star Trek calls a causality loop.
A fascinating theory! And in a broader sense, it’s worth wondering whether someone/something (including potentially the universe itself) doesn’t want us to observe the Higgs boson. Even if not from the future per se, interesting to speculate whether there might be some interference of some kind…
I think all of the attempts here to define paradox are perfect examples of why time travel is science fiction.
@gussnarp: Everything is science fiction until it’s invented / explained / understood. Just because we don’t grok it now, doesn’t mean it’s impossible, or that we never will…
this is really interesting.
@Lightlyseared
well yes, but that is not the original grandfather paradox scenario, nor is it congruent with the OP’s hardon collider scenario.
your’s is a case of a self fulfilling timeline, while the other two are cases of attempts to change the timeline
When I read the article I thought they were talking about a force of nature (unknown), not humans/aliens who invented a time machine. Thus bypassing the whole grandfather paradox. Did I have some bad mushrooms in my spaghetti?
@markyy I think they probably were talking about a force of nature, as if the very existence of the Higg’s boson is paradoxical and prevents itself.
I’ll believe it when there’s some DeLorean sightings.
How would the future know if it had succeeded in preventing the LHC from seeing the Higgs Boson? Surely they would be trapped in a timeline where it had been seen otherwise why would they try to prevent it?
@virtualist Cool, I’ve never heard of that movie, I’ll have to see it now.
@ragingloli In your original statement you said – yes it would be a paradox
if you went back in time to save your grandfather there would be no reason anymore to go back in time to save him, would there? You didn’t describe the grandfather paradox, I was pointing out the flaw in your logic.
As for the LHC it is also a self fulfilling time loop (or whatever). If the scientists know that discovering the Higgs Boson particle will destroy the universe and they travel from the future travel back in time to now to stop it then the universe will not be destroyed. This means the scientists will still be there in the future to travel back in time to stop the discovery.
@Lightlyseared You are assuming that it is people travelling back in time to stop the LHC, I think the scientists are theorizing more that the Higgs boson itself is altering time to prevent it’s own creation, or at least that the event of creating the Higgs is causing some sort of effect that prevents the creation of the Higgs. But I think however you look at it, the idea is that the creation of the particle enables the time travel that prevents the creation of the particle. Maybe the Times got it wrong when they said: “the hypothesized Higgs boson… might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one”, but if that’s the case, then it is a paradox. I like the idea that the Higgs boson creation event creates some kind of alteration in probability in the past to prevent its own creation, however paradoxical, it is amusing.
@gussnarp Don’t waist your breathe, I have a feeling most haven’t even read the article. Perhaps a force of nature was to vague, maybe it would be better to say the universe itself is pushing back on it’s own past to prevent the Biggs Hoson particle from being found. I can grasp that concept, but I lack the scientific knowledge to understand if or how this would be possible. Yes I have seen Star Trek too, that does not make me an expert on time travel.
I say find the damn particle and see what happens. Any word on when they will finally start that big washing machine?
@mattbrowne Thank you for that interesting link, any chance you have some wise words to get the conversation back on track? Big shoes, I know.
@Lightlyseared
it was a variation thereof. the essence of both the original paradox and the variation is that you decide to travel back in time to actively alter the timeline to achieve a different reality from what you have originally experienced. there was no logical flaw.
What make the paradox is that the killing of your grandfather kills you so you cant travel back in time so your granfather cant be killed. The paradox is that you would be both dead and alive at the same time.
@markyy – Sorry for my late reply. Well, I found the article interesting and highly entertaining. Personally, I don’t believe the LHC is being sabotaged by someone from the future. Not even by Dr. Emmett Brown messing around. One-way time travel into the future is a scientific fact, but it’s currently unknown whether the laws of physics would allow backwards time travel. Some interpretations of time travel suggest that an attempt to travel backwards in time might take one to a parallel universe which would begin to diverge from the traveler’s original universe after the moment the traveler arrived (Wikipedia).
What puzzles me about the article is the notion of a ‘Higgs producing machine’. The Higgs boson is a massive scalar elementary particle predicted to exist by the Standard Model in particle physics. If it exists, it exists already now this very moment with or without the existence of the LHC. The purpose of the LHC is to observe the Higgs i.e. confirm its existence. So it’s about experimental evidence either confirming or refuting the Higgs boson’s existence. Not creating the Higgs destroying the world. The lawsuit was about the potential of creating a tiny black hole that might eat up the Earth. Or the creation of strange quarks which could “infect” other quarks turning them into strange matter as well. You and I and all the other Flutherites would become strange as well.
The LHC will be repaired. The experiment will be carried out. The Fluther website will remain up and running the day after. We can then return to the discussion. Our existence will prove the article wrong. Or will it? Ha, the saboteurs might have succeeded in a parallel universe. No more Fluther website over there. Too bad.
@mattbrowne said: ”Some interpretations of time travel suggest that an attempt to travel backwards in time might take one to a parallel universe.” I like this interpretation, really makes more sense than worrying about the effects of changing the past.
I think Dan Brown is actually a time traveler from the future. First he wrote about what happened when anti-matter was created by the LHC (“Angels and Demons”) but when no one caught on that it was a warning, not a fictional novel, he went on to sabotage the LHC.
@gussnarp – You are right, symbologist Robert Langdon took the quarter of a gram of antimatter into the future, then went back in time and on 19 September 2008 he used a fraction of it to create a serious fault between two superconducting bending magnets. And the fools at CERN think they can repair this? Wait for Robert Langdon to come back once again. There’s still plenty of antimatter left for some great fireworks ;-)
sorry, but if your grandfather had been hit by a bus you would not be alive to go back and save him. plus what ragingloli said.
the only way you could do this without causing a paradox would be:
to be in the future, without having observed a higgs particle and knowing that the people at the LHC once tried to discover one but failed, you read that someone once suspected sabotage from the future as the reason why it never worked, you then remember that you have a time machine and you assume that the reason everything is ok is because you will one day travel back in time to sabotage it, and then based on said assumption you actually go back in time to sabotage something that does not need to be sabotaged.
any other way you try to work it would cause a paradox.
its just like if my grandfather is perfectly ok, and i assume that the only reason he is ok in the first place is because i am destined to go back in time to save him even though he does not need saving because i already saved him. i then go back in time to save him just in case.
in other words, the only thing you could go back in time for, is to make sure things turn out the way they already are.
@poisonedantidote Hmm, I like the idea as you sum it up in the last sentence. There is a flaw in your first sentence though. No one ever said your grandfather was hit by a bus before your father/mother was born. If the bus accident happened after your father/mother was born, then you would still be there to go back and stop it. No paradox.
@gussnarp
actually the paradox would still persist, because your memory would differ from the new version you created with your incursion into temporal mechanics. (your memory would be “my grandpa died in a bus accident”, but the new version would be “my grandpa did not die in a bus accident”. where did your memory come from if you prevented the event that caused it from taking place?
I don’t think I accept memory problems as a paradox. The human memory is a faulty thing, and for all we know time travel could lead to insanity, that’s not necessarily a paradox.
@gussnarp
yes it is.
thoughts are physical processes, and long term memories are specific physical configurations of your neurons and neural network.
It is a paradox because you have a physical structure in your head that does not have a cause because you prevented the cause from existing.
Well, I suppose that depends on how you define paradox, and what exactly a paradox means to the world. Interestingly, the only definitions I find for paradox are from the realm of logic, not quantum physics. I wonder then, if our notion of paradoxes involved in time travel is entirely fictional. For example, you may be right that it is in fact a paradox, but perhaps there is no reason to assume that the creation of a paradox necessarily negates the event happening.
I think that I prefer the notion that when you go back in time you automatically create a change and enter an entirely new timeline, a new universe in fact, and you still carry around a memory form a universe that you are no longer in.
@gussnarp
i would agree that there is no paradox if you stopped your grandfather being hit by a bus unintentionally. but if it is your intention to prevent it, as soon as you prevent it you would no longer have any reason to go back and prevent it.
then again, this is all nothing but speculation and assumption. if there is more than one time line for example then you could go back and kill your own grandfather and still be ok as he was never harmed in your personal time line.
the one that i have always wondered about, is what would happen if i went back in time before i was born, and i got hit by a bus and got killed in the past before i was born. i would die, then i would be born, i would age, travel back in time, die, be born, age travel back in time, die and be born again, over and over and over.
anyway… i think i have a solution to what is actually happening with the LHC. see, as soon as it is turned on and fired up [“This text has been edited out by the universe for your own protection”] thus totally avoiding any paradox and leading to [“This text has been edited out by the universe for your own protection”] could potentially destroy the universe.
I just took a look at the article the physicists in question wrote and it is a dense 41 page mathematical paper and I can’t begin to understand it in any detail, but they seem to be describing a kind of feedback effect or reflection on a quantum level. I think the idea may be that isolating the higgs changes the fundamental math of the universe so that this reflection or feedback ripples backward and distorts causation in minor ways, maybe.
I think the answer can be conclusively stated as “no.”
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