[wordup] Higgs boson - like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather

[Adam Shand]

I thought I'd already posted this out, but #fail.  This is the coolest  
thing I think I've ever read, I can only hope that it's true because  
it completely screws with my mind.

Adam.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/science/space/13lhc.html

The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate
October 13, 2009
By DENNIS OVERBYE

More than a year after an explosion of sparks, soot and frigid helium  
shut it down, the world’s biggest and most expensive physics  
experiment, known as the Large Hadron Collider, is poised to start up  
again. In December, if all goes well, protons will start smashing  
together in an underground racetrack outside Geneva in a search for  
forces and particles that reigned during the first trillionth of a  
second of the Big Bang.

Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary  
theories in science. I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space- 
time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No, I’m  
talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged  
by its own future. 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, like a time traveler who goes back in time  
to kill his grandfather.

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.

According to the so-called Standard Model that rules almost all  
physics, the Higgs is responsible for imbuing other elementary  
particles with mass.

“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unpublished essay, Dr.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.”

You might think that the appearance of this theory is further proof  
that people have had ample time — perhaps too much time — to think  
about what will come out of the collider, which has been 15 years and  
$9 billion in the making.

The collider was built by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear  
Research, to accelerate protons to energies of seven trillion electron  
volts around an 18-mile underground racetrack and then crash them  
together into primordial fireballs.

For the record, as of the middle of September, CERN engineers hope to  
begin to collide protons at the so-called injection energy of 450  
billion electron volts in December and then ramp up the energy until  
the protons have 3.5 trillion electron volts of energy apiece and  
then, after a short Christmas break, real physics can begin.

Maybe.

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.”

He agreed that skepticism would be in order. After all, most big  
science projects, including the Hubble Space Telescope, have gone  
through a period of seeming jinxed. At CERN, the beat goes on: Last  
weekend the French police arrested a particle physicist who works on  
one of the collider experiments, on suspicion of conspiracy with a  
North African wing of Al Qaeda.

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.

Sure, it’s crazy, and CERN should not and is not about to mortgage its  
investment to a coin toss. The theory was greeted on some blogs with  
comparisons to Harry Potter. But craziness has a fine history in a  
physics that talks routinely about cats being dead and alive at the  
same time and about anti-gravity puffing out the universe.

As Niels Bohr, Dr. Nielsen’s late countryman and one of the founders  
of quantum theory, once told a colleague: “We are all agreed that your  
theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy  
enough to have a chance of being correct.”

Dr. Nielsen is well-qualified in this tradition. He is known in  
physics as one of the founders of string theory and a deep and  
original thinker, “one of those extremely smart people that is willing  
to chase crazy ideas pretty far,” in the words of Sean Carroll, a  
Caltech physicist and author of a coming book about time, “From  
Eternity to Here.”

Another of Dr. Nielsen’s projects is an effort to show how the  
universe as we know it, with all its apparent regularity, could arise  
from pure randomness, a subject he calls “random dynamics.”

Dr. Nielsen admits that he and Dr. Ninomiya’s new theory smacks of  
time travel, a longtime interest, which has become a respectable  
research subject in recent years. 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.

We always assume that the past influences the future. But that is not  
necessarily true in the physics of Newton or Einstein. According to  
physicists, all you really need to know, mathematically, to describe  
what happens to an apple or the 100 billion galaxies of the universe  
over all time are the laws that describe how things change and a  
statement of where things start. The latter are the so-called boundary  
conditions — the apple five feet over your head, or the Big Bang.

The equations work just as well, Dr. Nielsen and others point out, if  
the boundary conditions specify a condition in the future (the apple  
on your head) instead of in the past, as long as the fundamental laws  
of physics are reversible, which most physicists believe they are.

“For those of us who believe in physics,” Einstein once wrote to a  
friend, “this separation between past, present and future is only an  
illusion.”

In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel “Sirens of Titan,” all of human history turns  
out to be reduced to delivering a piece of metal roughly the size and  
shape of a beer-can opener to an alien marooned on Saturn’s moon so he  
can repair his spaceship and go home.

Whether the collider has such a noble or humble fate — or any fate at  
all — remains to be seen. As a Red Sox fan my entire adult life, I  
feel I know something about jinxes.