Colbert, Cox, Relativity, and Time Traveling Sabotage
Comedy Central's resident faux-pundit, Stephen Colbert, interviewed rock star particle physicist (and People magazine's sexiest physicist) Brian Cox on the October 28 episode of The Colbert Report. Cox was there to promote his new book (co-written with Jeff Forshaw), Why Does E=mc2: And Why Should We Care?
Colbert led into the interview by discussing the recent analysis that concluded the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is failing because of influences from the future which prevent the Higgs boson from manifesting. In the days since I first posted about this analysis, I have thought about it more and come up with a counter-analysis.
The argument proposed is that there is some sort of inherent property that revealing a Higgs boson is "abhorent to the universe." For this reason, influences from the future cause the LHC to fail, to avoid the generation of a Higgs boson.
However, the LHC is only going to cause collisions of about 14 TeV energy ranges, and collisions of this sort (and higher energy levels) happen between particles in nature regularly. Influences from the future don't prevent stars from exploding or streams of high energy particles from colliding with the upper atmosphere. If these collisions result in Higgs bosons, it seems like they'd have be continually thwarted throughout the universe.
The analysis does have one way of being salvaged, however, and it's a far more economical solution. If the Higgs boson is "abhorent to nature," then maybe these sorts of collisions just don't generate it. In this scenario, there's no need to explain some sort of ad hoc influence from the future to prevent the Higgs from being discovered ... there would just need to be some element to the structure of the universe that makes the Higgs directly inaccessible at these energy levels.
Brian Cox rightfully calls these "sabotage from the future" results "bollocks," although he does say that this is more amusing bollocks than the stuff about the black holes devouring the earth (which is a "steaming pile of bollocks").
What he focuses his discussion on is the nature of space and time within the universe. His new book explains Einstein's theory of relativity, which is the foundation upon which all modern physics is built ... because it defines the environment (i.e. spacetime) in which all other science takes place. (Food science is, apparently, not science according to Cox, which tells me that he hasn't seen the Food Network program Good Eats.)
The show is available for free viewing on The Colbert Report website or on Hulu.com. It's the October 28 episode. You can skip directly to the second part, which contains the LHC discussion, or the third part which shows the interview with Cox.