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Large Hadron Collider

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Old Oct 19, 2009 | 06:13 PM
  #21  
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if its a repost sorry, i searched and i didnt find anything about this, still good though
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Old Oct 19, 2009 | 08:38 PM
  #22  
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Originally Posted by mxt_77,Oct 19 2009, 06:56 PM
They can't fail. Can't you see? They've already succeeded in the future, and that's how they were able to come back and stop themselves in the present.
lol

Can't you see!?!?
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Old Oct 20, 2009 | 04:28 AM
  #23  
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Wish I had thought of that excuse for some of my homework assignments growing up.
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Old Oct 20, 2009 | 05:25 AM
  #24  
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Wow, that fox news article was a total piece of shit.

Here's another one, somewhat better:

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.
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsha...-higgs-sab.html] http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsha...-higgs-sab.html
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Old Oct 20, 2009 | 05:28 AM
  #25  
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don't think this is a repost. new information on an old story.
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Old Oct 20, 2009 | 08:35 AM
  #26  
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That article should be amended to say "previously-respectable physicists."
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Old Oct 20, 2009 | 08:39 AM
  #27  
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it was a repost, it's just when the particle went back in time and changed the past, we hadn't established memory of it yet....
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Old Oct 20, 2009 | 12:48 PM
  #28  
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New Scientist article makes more sense. FOX article is simply Hollywood's take.
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Old Oct 20, 2009 | 01:06 PM
  #29  
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Originally Posted by senor_flojo,Oct 20 2009, 08:39 AM
it was a repost, it's just when the particle went back in time and changed the past, we hadn't established memory of it yet....
Well, technically, it wasnt a repost, until I had posted it, 1.) because thats what a repost is, and 2.) Because once i posted it, this thread went back in time, and made a copy of itself, making the original, a repost

...OBVIOUSLY
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Old Oct 20, 2009 | 05:16 PM
  #30  
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it wasn't me...it was the higgs!!
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