Back to the Future Part IV - The Higgs Boson Adventure
So while there are many weird physics theories out there, this latest one linked to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has even my scratching my head. Turns out that physicists Holger Bech Nielsen (of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen) and Masao Ninomiya (of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan) have put forth the idea that the LHC will fail to detect the Higgs boson ... because nature itself will intervene to keep this from happening.
Consider this scenario: You travel back in time and (presumably accidentally) cause the death of your grandfather. Therefore you cannot be born and, in turn, you cannot go back in time ... so your grandfather lives. So, you are actually born and go back in time and ... so on and so forth.
This is called the grandfather paradox, and some physicists believe that you could never actually go back in time to kill your own grandfather because of it. You could, however, go back in time and save your grandfather from being hit by a bus. (Physicist Stephen Hawking has proposed a chronology protection conjecture in an effort to avoid any of this sort of trouble in physics, by not allowing any time travel at all.)
In a sense, Nielsen and Ninomiya are predicting exactly the oppose - that the universe is using time travel to protect itself ... from us. According to their predictions, ("Test of Influence from Future in Large Hadron Collider: A Proposal" and "Search for Future Influence From LHC") the creation of the Higgs boson would (for reasons that aren't entirely clear) be so troublesome that the universe itself is acting to prevent the Higgs boson from ever being manufactured in an experiment. If the Higgs were created, then there'd be some sort of force in the future which moves backward in time and alters events so that the Higgs is not created.
Though likely proposed as something of an intellectual joke, the fact that the LHC has run into so many problems - technical hold-ups early on, equipment failures, and the recent scandal of a scientist associated with al Queda - helps lend some anecdotal support to the conjecture. It could even explain why the even more powerful Superconducting Supercollider (SSC) was abandoned in 1993 by the U.S. Congress.
The idea of the future affecting the present may be on the top of people's minds because of the success of the ABC television series FlashForward, which features a plotline where virtually the entire world experiences memories of the future. This series - and also Lost, for that matter - result in questions about whether events in the future can cause events in the present, and certainly this conjecture brings that abstract issue to the forefront.
For more details on the Nielsen-Ninomiya proposal, you can either read the papers themselves, or check out none other than the New York Times.
Comments
The idea that time or some future event is sabotaging the LHC if viewed correctly is not as bizarre as it first sounds. What or at least what I interpret the two eminent scientists are proposing is that space is not the only thing that expands but, as Einstein rightly hypothesised, time and space are relative. We live and appear to experience constant linear time, a minute today will be as long as a minute was yesterday and the same length tomorrow; but what if that isn’t the case? What if time similarly expands? We should also note that the expansion of space is not in anyway like the dots on an expanding balloon that is the classic classroom example. This model fails because the balloon is expanding into the classroom whereas our universe is not expanding into anything but itself. It is more a case of the measured distance between two points becoming greater due to complexity rather than too expansion. A better way to visualise this is as fractures or kinks, rather like a meandering river gaining length as the bends and contours become more accentuated over time. As the river represents space so traversing it becomes longer as the bends become more pronounced.
And just as the mountain and sea remain the same distance apart to an observer in an aircraft so an observer outside our universe would observe the same size object today as would have been observed immediately following the first appearance of the universe, the observer would see no difference in ‘size’ just as an observer of our river example would see the distance from the mountain source to the sea delta also remaining constant over time. The change however occurs within the river, it meanders, thus its length grows whilst its source and destination remain constant. For our universe this meandering is experienced as increasing complexity.
Time in this sense is rather like the flow rate of the river, when it was straight the flow was fast but as it becomes more convoluted so its flow is reduced but as the only means of measure we have is the flow itself it appears to remain constant, giving the illusion that time ticks to a constant rhythm.
What these scientists are proposing is that the convolutions could become so accentuated that they could double back on themselves, in fact this is not actually impossible even for a river, I myself have actually witnessed and have film of a river flowing against itself, flowing literally upstream!
But with the LHC the effect is to cause time and space to double back on itself, to accentuate the meanders so much that they loop, rather like the oxbow lakes of a river crossing a flat plain, so that a future event, a point further down the flow, bends to the point that it meets itself in the past, or upstream; thus causing the future, or a small part of it to meet its own past….
It may well transpire that as we get a better understanding of how time expands that will similarly rationalise Genesis, a 7 day event as it was experienced, with what we now visualize as an event having occurred over some 13 billion years. Nothing more than changes in flow as a consequence of evolving complexity.
Similarly one could ask why should nature find the Higgs Boson so abhorrent? What is it about this theorized but elusive particle that nature so despises? It should go without saying that the Higgs Boson is rather like life on Mars or elsewhere in the Universe a concept based on our current level or rather lack of, understanding. The theory is based on too principle assumptions, the first is that our models and past methods are both representative and true (the case for life elsewhere in the universe is believed to be a statistical certainty, yet we are devoid of any evidence whatsoever) and the second is that the universe is quantifiable and possible to understand in it’s entirety. However if history has taught us anything it is that most leaps forward are inevitably as a consequence of having first jumped in all the wrong directions until we are left with only the one possibility that remains and whilst there are exception, Einstein’s work being a prime example, such exceptions do not arise out of the standard scientific method. Einstein theorized relativity, he did not formulate a hypothesis and then test it; if he had then he would have based his hypothesis on what was understood and believed to have been true at the time and relativity as a theory would not now exist.
When we similarly look at the idea that the universe is quantifiable, that it can be understood in it’s entirety and thus as an experiment it can be repeated (this being one of the rigour tests of any theory; that it is repeatable) we find that unlike understanding the mechanisms within the universe, the universe itself is an anomaly; a one of event. What science generally argues is that once one has quantified all the components, that’s the bits that make up the universe that when correctly arrange these components reveal the whole picture; a bit lie a assembling a jigsaw puzzle. However any idea that we currently understand all the components is easy to blow out the water, for one component, one all of us are intimately associated with baffles us completely: ourselves.
Not one of us actually understands or can accurately predict our own behaviour and without knowing this component, chiefly the human mind, we can never hope to understand the near infinite variations and complexities of the components that are not us and make up the rest of the universe. Until one can completely quantify oneself then quantifying that which is not self will always elude us.
My sincere congratulations for Holger Bech Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya for coming up with this fresh idea much better described in 1974 by Strugatzky Brothers in their “A Billion Years Before the End of the World” novel. Really, I’m impressed.