The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate (sigh)

[girl gone mad]

Memo to the New York Times: Just because an idea is crazy doesn't mean it's good Physics.

This theory of backward causation is goofball crackpottery and even if the LHC suffers a further string of failures, I could think of thousands of better explanations, some equally strange but based in actual science.

Here's the disappointing piece from the Times:

The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/science/space/13lhc.html?ref=science

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 In an unpublished essay, Dr.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.”

[ChairmanAgnostic]

1. And how does one explain Liz Cheney?

It is rather the reverse. She and her spawn donor are like anti-Higgs particles, hating everyone and everything else in the world, and attempt to destroy them.

[hunter]

2. If there was such an effect I can't imagine it manifesting itself as bad luck...

:crazy:

If anything, the effect would be subtle on the same level as parity violation, neutrino oscillations, proton decays and all that.

It's silly season at the LHC as the tension builds to what must be intolerable levels.

I hope Dennis Overbye is writing tongue in cheek, but given the sorry state of science journalism we have to wonder.

On the other hand, in my personal model of physics, the past is as shifty as the future. We exist at a focal point where an indeterminate "future" is reconciled with an indeterminate "past" in a very complex pattern of quantum level transactions and entanglements.

If it's true that Nature abhors the Higgs boson (if there are such identifiable entities) then there are any number of places she might bury them beyond the reach of our current technology. She need not bother herself with card games.

[joshcryer]

3. "[...] whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct." Haha, love that.

[RagAss]

4. Sequential duration is the only crackpot idea,

[girl gone mad]

5. Not sure what you mean, but..

I think the idea that nature is keeping us from creating a particle which, if it exists at all, is prevalent in the universe, is just more LHC-inspired hype. The notion that a theory can't be tested because backward causation will prevent us from obtaining a result is pseudoscience, on par with ghosts and astrology, in my mind.

This particular theory was discussed and dismissed by peers of Nielson and Ninomiya some years ago.

http://dorigo.wordpress.com/2007/07/21/respectable-physicists-gone-crackpotty/
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2007/07/whats-new.html

[RagAss]

6. Reality is one thing...we create past, present and future because of the limitation of ....

our brain and sense organs.