Future present

"I have suggested that supernovae are the industrial accidents of advanced civilisations."
--Arthur C. Clarke, October 2007

An element of the Large Hadron Collider (picture source)

Question: What happens when you try to create Higgs boson particle?
Answer: The creation of an observable Higgs boson particle is so abhorrent to the Universe that at some point in the future, when walking monkeys on some minuscule planet in an outer-spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy discover how to do it, the Universe reaches back across time and prevents this happening.

At least that’s what two physicists have claimed in a research paper entitled “Search for Effect for Influence from Future in Large Hadron Collider”

The CERN project (of which I had previously written about here) known as the Large Hadron Collider is a machine 27km big that attempts to collide two beams of protons together to observe the resulting explosion and expand our knowledge of the universe or something to that effect. A successful collision would apparently enable physicists to observe the Higgs boson particle.

The Higgs boson particle is a theoretical particle that will ”explain the origin of mass in the universe” (thanks wikipedia). Scientist haven’t seen it (yet), but our current understanding of particle physics predicts it. Particle physics is the research of subatomic particles. Yeah, that explains it.....

The physicist propose an experiment involving a deck of ‘decision cards’ (ie “Run LHC experiment” or “For God’s sake you puny mortals, don’t even attempt this experiment -- yours truly, a future Higgs boson particle”) to model various probabilities whether to run the LHC or not, they suggest that the current difficulties in getting the LHC working, and also what happened to the ill-fated US SSC, may be as a result of future Universe affecting the present.

How can they say this? Well, according to the theory of General Relativity and and the Standard Model of Particles, time travel is theoretically possible:

“Particles and their antiparticles can also be thought of as being the same entity travelling in opposite directions in time.”

In plain english, the physicists are saying that in the future, when a Higgs boson particle is created, the consequence of this is so great that we are feeling the effects of it in the past (ie. now).

Here is a simple diagram I created to show this:

see?!? simple...

Not that I'm suggesting that this experiment could cause a supernova, as the Arthur C. Clarke quote above might imply, although if you happen to be running an experiment that requires so much energy that you have to schedule it around the energy supply of an entire continent, to term a mishap "an industrial accident" may be waaayyy understating it. From the previous article:

"All of this means that when something goes wrong—even something small—there's a very real chance that it will go wrong in a big way."

And a much scarier sentence a little bit further on:

"That's not to say that we have no idea what will happen; rather, there are a range of possibilities, some of which may be out of reach of the energies created by the LHC."

One hopes all the experiments go exactly. to. plan.

Links:

• The New York Times article
• The website of the ill-fated Supercolliding SuperConductor
• Wikipedia page on Supernova