woah maybe the "causality" scientists are right about the LHC... get this:

[johnny861]

There's a group of tinfoil hat scientists who are speculating that we are not meant to discover the Higgs-Boson, that it would cause some sort of catastrophic event that would fuck up time and space somehow and basically be very very bad for us lol...

They speculate that it is therefore plausible to suggest that own future might manipulate our time to sabotage our attempts at ever discovering the Higgs.

I'm generalizing here, but it's some pretty tin-foil hat far out sci-fi sounding shit.

Well, the LHC has had one problem after another so far... and now this bizarre shit happens:


http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11...dump_incident/

Large Hadron Collider scuttled by birdy baguette-bomber
Bread on the busbars could have seen 'dump caverns' used

A bird dropping a piece of bread onto outdoor machinery has been blamed for a technical fault at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) this week which saw significant overheating in sections of the mighty particle-punisher's subterranean 27-km supercooled magnetic doughnut.

According to scientists at the project, had the LHC been operational - it is scheduled to recommence beaming later this month - the snag would have caused it to fail safe and shut down automatically. This would put the mighty machine out of action for a few days while it was restarted, but there would be no repeat of the catastrophic damage suffered last September. On that occasion, an electrical connection in the circuit itself failed violently, causing a massive liquid-helium leak and knock-on damage along hundreds of metres of magnets.

Reg readers alerted us yesterday to the temperature rises in the LHC's Sector 81, which began in the early hours of Tuesday morning: most of the collider's operational data can be viewed on the web for all to see. Initial enquiries to CERN press staff led to assurances that the rises were the result of routine tests.

However Dr Mike Lamont, who works at the CERN control centre and describes himself as "LHC Machine Coordinator and General Dogsbody" later confirmed that there had indeed been a problem. Lamont, briefing reporters at the control room yesterday, told the Reg that machinery on the surface - the LHC accelerator circuit itself is buried deep beneath the Franco-Swiss border outside Geneva - had suffered a fault caused by "a bit of baguette on the busbars", thought perhaps to have been dropped by a bird.

As a result, temperatures in part of the LHC's circuit climbed to almost 8 Kelvin - significantly higher than the normal operating temperature of 1.9, and close to the temperature at which the LHC's niobium-titanium magnets are likely to "quench", or cease superconducting and become ordinary "warm" magnets - by no means up to the task imposed on them. Dr Tadeusz Kurtyka, a CERN engineer, told the Reg that this can happen unpredictably at temperatures above 9.6 K.

An uncontrolled quench would be bad news with the LHC in operation, possibly leading to serious damage of the sort which crippled the machine last September. At the moment there are no beams of hadrons barrelling around the huge magnetic doughnut at close to light speed, but when there are, each of the two beams has as much energy in it as an aircraft carrier underway. If the LHC suddenly lost its ability to keep the beam circling around its vacuum pipe, all that energy would have to go somewhere - with results on the same scale as being rammed by an aircraft carrier.


continued on site

[Funkenstein]

As long as it's not in my backyard, I'm okay with it.

Imagine that area being stuck in a causality loop. Groundhog Day for everybody!!!

[johnny861]

Originally Posted by Funkenstein

As long as it's not in my backyard, I'm okay with it.

Imagine that area being stuck in a causality loop. Groundhog Day for everybody!!!

no shit... it would definitely be bizarro world for sure...


Here's the Casuality argument for context:
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/sh...higgs-sab.html


Time-travelling Higgs sabotages the LHC. No, really

Richard Webb, physics features editor

Could the Large Hadron Collider be sabotaging itself from the future? That's the suggestion of a couple of reasonably distinguished theoretical physicists, which has received a fresh airing in the New York Times today.

Actually, it's the Higgs boson that is doing the sabotage. Apparently, among the many singular properties of the Higgs that the LHC is meant to discover could be the ability to turn back time to stop its cover being blown.

Or as the New York Times puts it:


"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, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather."


That is the ultimate reason, suggest the duo - Danish string theory pioneer Holger Bech Nielsen and the Japanese physicist Masao Ninomiya - why Congress stopped the funding for the USA's Superconducting Super Collider in 1993, and why the LHC itself suffered such an embarrassing meltdown shortly after starting up last year.
Reading the first paper from a couple of years ago and the follow-up last week, it's not quite clear to me how or why the Higgs contrives to influence the minds of Congressmen, or cause LHC magnets to overheat from its point of discovery some time in the future. Even trying to consider how it would achieve such feats makes my own magnets overheat.

The authors clear up some of the mystery by describing their model as starting with "a series of not completely convincing, but still suggestive, assumptions".

Some more excitable corners of the physics blogosphere have been considerably less polite about the theory.

Even more fun is Nielsen and Ninomiya's suggestion of how their theory might be tested: with a card game.

First, take a million or so cards, each scribbled with a future fate for the LHC. Make them overwhelmingly read "carry on", but add just one or two saying "shut the thing down".

If you pull one of the "shut down" ones at random, you have pretty good proof that the Higgs is trying to tell you something from the future.

I don't know what happens if you disobey the warning: perhaps that's where the thing with the black holes that eat the world come in.

I'm not sure anyone in charge needs my advice on this, but I'd be tempted to go ahead with the LHC restart anyway, just on the off-chance Nielsen and Ninomiya are wrong.

If the thing keeps on failing to work, at least you have the perfect excuse: it wasn't me, it was the Higgs.

[Sinner]

the deathstar was 100% indestructible!

well... 99.99%..... there was this ooooonnnneee little hole about the size of a one man space ship...


I guess the hardon's hole was the size of a breadcrumb

[Funkenstein]

Originally Posted by Sinner

I guess the hardon's hole was the size of a breadcrumb

LOL @ Hard on hole. Gay spin on science makes for great chuckles.

Sorta like Not Neccesarily the News' old version of Sniglets.

P.S. The "don't aim here" hole was no bigger than a womprat. Ask Gibert.

[SmoothHeavy]

Because it couldn't possibly be the fact that this is the most complicated thing humans have ever built and will be inherently fussy. If it's got tits, wheels or is the LHC you're going to have problems.

[matias pecile]

Originally Posted by SmoothHeavy

Because it couldn't possibly be the fact that this is the most complicated thing humans have ever built and will be inherently fussy. If it's got tits, wheels or is the LHC you're going to have problems.

thank you. the idea that this machine is creating snags for itself from the future because of a particle is outrageous

[johnny861]

Originally Posted by matias pecile

thank you. the idea that this machine is creating snags for itself from the future because of a particle is outrageous

Yea, it's pretty absurd, but the premise is that it's not the machine that is causing problems for itself, it's the attempt at finding the Higgs that is causing the sabotage.

They also use the U.S. Super Collider project from 1993 as another example. The example being, in mid project, the funding was cancelled on it.


But yea... Scientist Conspiracy Theories. Nice.

[matias pecile]

I'm just not sure how these situations would arise at the macro level... I mean, what wills the bird to drop some baguette bread into a duct; God? the Higgs Boson continuum? Manbearpig? keke

[PETA]

'cause as a matter of fact, as we discovered in the train, tomorrow never happens, man. It's all the same fucking day, man.

[Funkenstein]

J. Joplin would love that nod.

[PETA]

I like to think the Lord didn't let her down... he let her out.

[johnny861]

Originally Posted by matias pecile

I'm just not sure how these situations would arise at the macro level... I mean, what wills the bird to drop some baguette bread into a duct; God? the Higgs Boson continuum? Manbearpig? keke

Maybe people? But then it would be so far fetched, but not necessarily impossible.

According to the Wheeler delayed choice experiment, observing a particle now can change what happened to another particle in the past.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheeler...ice_experiment

If you observe which of the two slits light passes through, you force it to behave like a particle. If you don’t, and observe where it lands on a screen behind the slits, it behaves like a wave.

But if you wait for it to pass through the slit, and then observe which way it came through, it will retroactively force it to have passed through one or the other. In other words, causality is working backwards: the present is affecting the past.


While this occurs only in fractions of a second in a lab experiment, Wheeler suggested that light from stars that has bent around a gravitational well in between could be observed in the same way. In the case of stars, observing something now could change what happened thousands or millions of years in the past.

Of course if that was truly the case, then that really foreshadows some cool shit that's going to happen in our own future, especially in matters of space travel.


However, it's more probable that we will get invaded by aliens who want to use the Earth as a dumping ground, rather than our futureselves affecting particles to manipulate the past. or is it?