…and this is a 
OK, I confess: I completely lack the tools and background to evaluate this claim:
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.
Except for one thing: the proponents of this idea are operating in the world of pure speculation, and have no evidence to support it, yet. That tells me that I'm best off provisionally rejecting it. I'll start incorporating crazy counter-intuitive notions about the nature of the universe when the cold implacable hand of the universe starts shoving them down my throat, not before!
Physical Science
Comments
Posted by: Glen Davidson
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October 14, 2009 2:06 PM
Biologists are weird, so there.
As to the whole Higgs' boson being abhorrent to nature, surely if we can make it "nature" already has, in the Big Bang and in later high-energy phenomena like black holes and gamma ray bursts. This seems to be the old "we'll make black holes and destroy the earth" objection, which is as easily answered with "if we can do it with the LHC, nature's done it thousands of times before."
Maybe there's something different about this scenario, but I doubt it. Physicists are generally sensible people, yet there's so much weird in physics that it seems to breed a lot of crank claims.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
Posted by: SaraJ
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October 14, 2009 2:07 PM
But if the creation goes back in time to stop the collider, then the collider wouldn't have been made, and then the creation wouldn't have been made to go back in time to stop the collider, so the collider would've been built, but then it would've created the creation to go back in time to stop the collider, but then... okay this is making my brain hurt.
Posted by: amphiox
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October 14, 2009 2:09 PM
So is this the latest explanation for that breakdown last year?
Posted by: rlrr
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October 14, 2009 2:10 PM
Why not ripple back in time to prevent life from ever evolving on earth?
BTW, I wrote about this yesterday:
http://rlrr.drum-corps.net/science/2505
I'd like to see if there any math behind this claim or if it is purely some sort of idle specualtion...
Posted by: SirBedevere
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October 14, 2009 2:10 PM
It's nice that they are described as "otherwise distinguished" physicists, as if this new claim makes them less distinguished :)
Posted by: kopd
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October 14, 2009 2:13 PM
"So is this the latest explanation for that breakdown last year?"
"It didn't work and that proves it worked!"
Brilliant! Pass the Guinness. :-)
Posted by: RagingBullwinkle
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October 14, 2009 2:14 PM
[quote]Except for one thing: the proponents of this idea are operating in the world of pure speculation, and have no evidence to support it, yet.[/quote]
Well it could have been an African Higgs boson, but not a European Higgs boson. I'm not suggesting that they're non migratory.
Posted by: Brian
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October 14, 2009 2:15 PM
Sounds like they were inspired from reading Douglas Adams.
Posted by: Rev. BigDumbChimp
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October 14, 2009 2:18 PM
I wonder if while it's back there if I could convince it to erase a few decisions I made?
Posted by: Bob L
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October 14, 2009 2:19 PM
So this is what "hard science" looks like; an episode of Star Trek: Next Generation?
Posted by: Nemo
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October 14, 2009 2:21 PM
It's not good mad science unless it's abhorrent to nature.
Posted by: firemancarl
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October 14, 2009 2:23 PM
Ragingbullwinkle you said "Well it could have been an African Higgs boson, but not a European Higgs boson. I'm not suggesting that they're non migratory."
Yes, but what is the airspeed velocity when loaded with pounds o bacon? They could grip it by the husk.....
Posted by: genesgalore
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October 14, 2009 2:25 PM
they are goofballs. oh, reality can be split with mathematics.
Posted by: The Science Pundit
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October 14, 2009 2:34 PM
I've checked over their calculations and it seems that they overlooked an important consequence. If the energy is greater 1.21 x 10^9 GW, the ripple in time will open a portal to the previous adjacent brane dimension allowing an army of reptilian warriors from another multiverse enter our space. We're doomed!!!
Posted by: Last Hussar
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October 14, 2009 2:39 PM
"I'll start incorporating crazy counter-intuitive notions about the nature of the universe when the cold implacable hand of the universe starts shoving them down my throat, not before"
Best open wide prof- Sub Atomic Physics is full of stuff that is counter-intuitive yet true.
Also do you not rail against Cretinists who argue intuitive=true *cough*watchmaker*cough*
Posted by: recovering catholic
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October 14, 2009 2:39 PM
Quote from the website PZ links to, by one of the "otherwise distinguished physicists":
“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.”
Nuff said.
Posted by: lose_the_woo
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October 14, 2009 2:41 PM
I read that article yesterday, and physics is my first love, but I must say I was surprised when I noticed I was not at the Onion while reading the article.
Posted by: KemaTheAtheist
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October 14, 2009 2:41 PM
I'll let it slip this time, Nielsen and Ninomiya, but try to bring religion into science again and I'll have your badge and your weapon! Errr... labcoat and safety goggles!
WTF does this guy thinks this conjecture is a theory when it is at best a hypothesis and worst the ravings of a delusional psycopath.
Nielsen: I'm invincible!
PZ: You're a looney...
Posted by: Killua
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October 14, 2009 2:41 PM
I just saw this article on another site...
These two are insane. Really, insane. "Stop us from producing a Higgs", the LHC produces collisions that are orders of magnitude smaller than upper atmosphere collisions, the same argument to say "why a black hole won't form" can be applied to "why the Higgs won't kill us all".
The LHC is about DETECTING the Higgs, not creating one, even the Tevatron supposedly should have created a few, it's just it wasn't capable of detecting them.
Crackpots are crackpots, physicists get them too.
Posted by: Jadehawk, OM
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October 14, 2009 2:47 PM
that actually reminds me of a scene from The End of Eternity, where an act of time-traveling social engineering results in another attempt at space-flight being abandoned.Posted by: James Sweet
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October 14, 2009 2:47 PM
There is definitely a lot of math in the two papers referenced by the NYT article. IANAPhysicist, so I didn't really follow a single bit of it. I suspected at first they might be doing a leg-pull, but I'm not so sure.
This is probably completely unfair, but the single biggest factor leading me to believe they are cranks is that they over-used exclamation points in the two papers in question. heh...
My leading theory right now is that, like Schroedinger and his ill-fated cat, they spotted what seemed to be a highly non-intuitive consequence of the mathematics, and devised a way to extrapolate this counter-intuitive effect from the quantum level (where we might accept it with the hand-waving that "quanta are weird") to the macroscopic level where it becomes reducto ad absurdum... except, I think unlike Schroedinger, these two gentleman are under the influence of significant amounts of mind-altering chemicals, so that when they arrived on this absurd macroscopic result, their reaction was, "Fuck yeah, let's try it!"
I see Douglas Adams has already been brought up in this thread... wasn't it Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency where some scientists decided to actually perform the Schroedinger's cat experiment? To be honest, I think that is what is going on here...
Posted by: lose_the_woo
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October 14, 2009 2:48 PM
Sometimes, professionally speaking, it's appropriate to say:
"And now I think you're just making shit up."
Posted by: MrFire
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October 14, 2009 2:49 PM
The article smacks of tongue-in-cheekery. Especially this section:
I call Poe. At least, on the article's author.
Also, I just realized the picture of the LHC is like the gravity drive thing from Event Horizon.
*shudders and soils pants*
Posted by: James Sweet
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October 14, 2009 2:52 PM
In fairness to the authors of the paper, they acknowledge exactly this point. Their argument is that their model does not kick in until there is the presence of a large number of Higgs-Boson particles. It's buried somewhere in one of the papers they wrote... Sorry I can't find it.
I'm not saying they aren't insane or aren't cranks, though :) As I mentioned in a previous comment, IANAPhysicist, so I can't really follow whether their math makes any sense or not.
I am pretty sure they are not run-of-the-mill LHC alarmists, though. At worst, it appears to me that they are seeking to exploit the current hysteria over the LHC to attempt to run a pie-in-the-sky pet experiment that they see as being unlikely to succeed, but one which has very low costs and a very high payoff if it were to succeed. The "danger" they reference in regards to the LHC in the two papers seems to be somewhat incidental, and they only mention it when they are pitching their experiment (the danger is not ever mentioned when they talk about the theory behind their proposed experiment)
Posted by: Carlie of the lacy, gently wafting adjectives
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October 14, 2009 2:53 PM
Is this what they call wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff?
Posted by: KemaTheAtheist
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October 14, 2009 2:57 PM
@21
Fixed...
Hypothesis -> Evidence -> Verification and Repetition -> Theory
Posted by: nathaniel-tagg.myopenid.com
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October 14, 2009 3:00 PM
Physicists often like to play with ideas like this, and it's not a bad toy-idea as it goes. Our reasons for disbelieving in reverse causality are the obvious kill-your-own-grandfather things. But it's entirely possible to build a plausible scenario with reverse causation as long as you modify your notion of free will. (This isn't a stretch - determinism similarly modifies free will, in that you cannot decide ANYthing at any time, you can only decide the things that are determined by causes.) So, the question as to what reverse-causal processes could exist is an interesting one.
But it's only a fun idea. You'll notice that the scientists are not credited with writing a peer-reviewed paper, or that even they take their own idea seriously. It's a good what-if scenario that can you thinking about fundamental things in a new light.
No one has claimed this to be a supported idea, or even meritorious. This is just the usual terrible science journalism. Whereas natural evolution (a fact) is demoted to the stance of just-a-theory, often just-a-cute-idea is promoted to the status of theory.
It's all part of bad science journalism: hype the silly stuff to make scientists look like wasteful idlers, and poo-poo the solid stuff with "balance" to put scientists on an even keel with religious people and/or kooks.
Blame the Times, not the physicists.
Posted by: James Sweet
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October 14, 2009 3:01 PM
Upon doing some further reading, I think the whole thing may be a play on words. They do some math that shows a large number of Higgs Boson particles producing an action that has an imaginary (as in square root of -1) part, and I believe they may be punning on the definition of "imaginary".
I am not quite exactly sure, but that is my current guess.
Posted by: Kobra
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October 14, 2009 3:02 PM
Those aren't physicists, those are crackpots. At least theoretical physics is based on extrapolation of available data, not wild-ass guesses.
Posted by: Nebula99
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October 14, 2009 3:02 PM
I saw this on Tuesday and was going to e-mail PZ about it, but I figured if I waited long enough he would post it, as it's just that weird :-). BTW, the Times article said that Nielson was one of the guys who came up with string theory... so, yeah. And Bob L, YES cutting-edge physics is like an episode of Star Trek: Next Generation. In fact, cutting-edge physics implies that there may be a universe in which the laws of physics are the same as those from Next Generation. And one where the universe is exactly as described in the Bible, so if the multiverse concept is valid I count myself lucky not to have wound up in that one. Note: if anyone on here knows more physics than I do and I am botching the concept of Sum Over Histories, let me know please.
Posted by: James Sweet
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October 14, 2009 3:06 PM
Hmmm.... is this sufficient "evidence" to support my "hypothesis" that you have a stick up your ass? (And are you sure you want to proceed to the "repetition" stage of this experimental verification?)
;p Nah, just teasing. Fair 'nuff. It is probably worth training myself away from the vernacular use of the word "theory", since it has been so thoroughly abused as of late.
Though I think, shoving that stick back up our collective asses, "hypothesis" would probably have been inappropriate in my earlier comment as well, since what I said was not stated particularly precisely and was not particularly testable. "Guess" probably would have been the most appropriate word to use. :p
Posted by: Hyperon
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October 14, 2009 3:13 PM
It's been known since at least 1905 that Nature is astoundingly weird and counter-intuitive. No further evidence is needed to prove that. What's especially counter-intuitive about the above hypothesis is that it appears self-contradictory. I've done quite a bit of reading into the physics of time travel, and it seems to me that the grandfather paradox is just as paradoxical to theoretical physicists as it is to everybody else. There are a number of "cosmetic" ways around the grandfather paradox, e.g. invoking parallel universes or postulating that wave functions are many-valued in t. Basically though, they are, as far as I can tell, all completely arbitrary and without foundation.
Despite this, I have quite a considerable reservation with PZ's above article. He says the hypothesis is "unsupported", presumably meaning it lacks empirical footing. However, the Higgs boson itself (which almost all physicists take seriously) also in a meaningful way lacks empirical support, as it hasn't yet been found. Lots of people, perhaps including PZ, do not recognize that theory itself can supply evidence.
Posted by: Rev. BigDumbChimp
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October 14, 2009 3:16 PM
Hyperion I think you dropped that bone.
The one you obviously have to pick with PZ.
Posted by: Nebula99
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October 14, 2009 3:16 PM
Oops, forgot to ask this question: If Higgs bosons are responsible for particles having mass, then don't there have to be some wherever it is possible for things to have mass? That is, if we can detect something as having mass, don't there have to be Higgs bosons around? Wikipedia, (which I admit is imperfect, but still generally decent), says: "If the Higgs boson exists, it is an integral and pervasive component of the material world." If that's true, then why would creating/observing some be bad and why would "God" dislike them? It seems like either the Higgs is nothing like what I thought or these physicists are not making much sense.
Posted by: Brian English
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October 14, 2009 3:17 PM
This reminds me of a time travel philosophical thought experiment. Imagine that you built a bomb that would explode an hour before when triggered. If the bomb exists you can't explode it. If you did explode it, you couldn't have.
It seems to be just another version of Russell's paradox. The barber who shaves everyone who doesn't shave himself.
Posted by: Anubis Bloodsin the third
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October 14, 2009 3:18 PM
Seems that all is not quite hunky dory with the LHC.
They have recently ...last couple of days anyway...got temp down in 6 of the 8 sectors to 1.9*K and the other two should be down to this operating parameter in a couple of weeks...
After further calibration runs it seems to be mooted that collisions will be initiated around mid to late November!
But the 7 trillion eV will not be deployed until 2011 at the earliest because splices b'twixt 'n' b'tween magnets are still extremely questionable...estimated at possibly thousands of 'splices' are still moody in temperament.
But there will be runs up to 5 trillion eV...so after 24 million quid tis still not quite right...a few magnets seem to have gone awol performance wise as well...weird...
Tis a sign of ...either gross incompetence in signing off the engineering or a preclude to an event the like of which none shall ever be able to report... ;-)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8270427.stm
Posted by: futuremonkey
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October 14, 2009 3:19 PM
There ought to be something akin to "Poe's Law" for physicists. At a certain point, it becomes impossible to tell whether or not a physicist is joking.
Posted by: KemaTheAtheist
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October 14, 2009 3:25 PM
No. A rectal examination would be required.
Exactly my point. How can we expect anyone to ever drop the "just a theory" canard if we continue to propagate the vernacular definition they use to make the argument?
Posted by: S.C. Kavassalis
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October 14, 2009 3:26 PM
As absurd as some of that may sound, it's not completely foreign thinking to physicists.
Purely special relativity yields the standard "Grandfather's paradox", whereby a closed timelike loop, one is able to go back and kill their own grandfather, preventing their own conception. Since a paradox of this form is so offensive to classical logic (and it's Boolean algebra and classical logic that we are using when we most often treat these matters), closed timelike loops are forbidden. Another appeal, basically to classical logic that is commonly, although certainly not rigorously, used is, "If time travel were possible, where are all the time travelers?" As silly as it sounds, this is reason enough for most people. It's this same logic that Nielsen and Ninomiya are using.
Fun thought experiments and logic puzzles these papers are, but physics they are not. It's not science, in any standard sense of the word, and shouldn't be treated on the same level.
Posted by: Greg F.
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October 14, 2009 3:28 PM
From what I understand in their paper, this claim is pretty bogus. It would require that a quantum particle violate causality and become a tachyon.
So far, special relativity forbids that. As a boson, the Higgs can be in the same place at the same time (unlike a fermion such as a proton or electron) but that's about the extent of its amazing abilities.
Until we can produce a tachyon in a collider, I'm filing this one under "obtuse purple prose" and "not even wrong."
Posted by: Cuttlefish, OM, CR
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October 14, 2009 3:29 PM
I wonder: could I write a rhyme
So horrible it turns back time
To stop me, thus, from writing it?
Or is this just a crock of shit?
I'll so abuse the nomenclature,
Make a rhyme abhorred by nature,
Invent, perhaps, the perfect pun,
Which must be stopped before begun!
Reverse effect hypothesized,
No longer may we act surprised
The boson never showed its face:
It did, but Nature hit "erase".
Posted by: Greg F.
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October 14, 2009 3:30 PM
correction...
I meant to say that two Higgs bosons can be at the same place at the same time since the Pauli-exclusion principle doesn't apply to bosons, only to fermions.
Posted by: mmfwmc
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October 14, 2009 3:32 PM
How's this for a million to one chance:
I just finished reading "Sirens of Titan" half an our ago. The article gives the ending away. If I'd stopped reading to check your blog (which I regularly do) then I would now be a very unhappy camper.
I guess someone up there likes me.
Posted by: Nebula99
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October 14, 2009 3:34 PM
Futuremonkey sez:
There ought to be something akin to "Poe's Law" for physicists. At a certain point, it becomes impossible to tell whether or not a physicist is joking.
It would probably fit better as a corollary to Clark's third law, which states: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Law 3a: Any sufficiently complex/recent physics concept is indistinguishable from one that's been made up.
I mean seriously: matter with the wrong electric charge that ceases to exist when it touches anything? ;-)
Posted by: KemaTheAtheist
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October 14, 2009 3:35 PM
Another brilliant work, Cuddlefish.
That poem reminds me of this old one:
One bright day in the middle of the night,
Two dead boys stood up to fight.
Back to back to face one another,
They drew their swords and shot each other.
A deaf policeman heard the noise,
And came and killed the two dead boys.
If you don't believe this lie is true,
Ask the blind man. He saw it too.
Posted by: Silič O'Nopolitanopoulos, Färschdbischuf Beesknees aus Ulm und Klein Elguth, Elector Pharynguline.
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October 14, 2009 3:37 PM
Still need to read the article, but Holger has been on about this for years as I understand it.
He's always been a bit ... eccentric ... but by all accounts he is a genuinely brilliant physicist.
That's not to say that he's right, but I'll assume that he knows that, himself.
He's earned the right to speculate wildly - just like, say, Pauling, Dyson and even Margulis - but unlike them, I don't know if he's yet entered crackpot territory.
Posted by: JackC
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October 14, 2009 3:39 PM
I love it when physicists get all physicist-y. Theoretical Physicists particularly. To be a Theoretical Physicist, it helps to be more or less completely nuts to start with. These two are right there.
They have a distinct advantage though. If the HB is NOT detected, they can claim they were correct all along.
I just reach out to Feynman when people say things like this.
JC
Posted by: charfles
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October 14, 2009 3:41 PM
I think what it means is, in the "many-worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics, when it is possible to cause some kind of "reverse causality" or whatever the universe collapses. Only those "worlds" where the device that causes it (the LHC) fail to function (from mechanical or whatever) are left around to ponder this question of why it failed. In other words, if you are reading this, you are in a universe that failed to destroy itself.
It sounds like some physicists are just having fun with some sci-fi concepts that might have a remote plausibility in some way to reality. I don't think anybody at the LHC is seriously considering this as the reason. It might just mean they are really bored.
This is similar in concept to Niven's law of time travel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niven%27s_laws#Niven.27s_Law_.28re:_Time_travel.29
Posted by: MrFire
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October 14, 2009 3:43 PM
Speaking of time warps, I think Cuttlefish freezes time, and actually spends days writing those masterpieces.
There really is no other scientific explanation. Other than that perhaps I have a massive inferiority complex.
Posted by: abb3w
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October 14, 2009 3:47 PM
nathaniel-tagg.myopenid.com: But it's only a fun idea.
Not "only", just "mostly". For some of the physics, there really isn't a better explanation for the experimental observations. See Conway and Kochen [PDF], for example.
The resolution may boil down to "Nature abhors a vacuum, but really, REALLY despises time paradoxes"; compare the current speculation about the LHC with Larry Niven's SF short "Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation" (1977; collected in Convergent Series).
Posted by: Feynmaniac
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October 14, 2009 3:49 PM
I too have some serious reservations. The alternative explanation seems much simpler: "complicated machines tend to fuck up". Windows users know this rule all too well.
I recall Steven Weinberg saying some physicists want the experiment to come back negative (i.e, no Higgs bosons found). That would mean physicists would have to go back to the drawing board and would have a lot of interesting work to do.
_ _ _
As for the 'killing your grandfather (before you were born)' paradox the most convincing solution I've seen is the Novikov self-consistency principle, which basically states that the probability of any time paradox events occurring is zero. However, it's far from definitive.
Posted by: Daniel de Rauglaudre
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October 14, 2009 3:49 PM
#14 SciencePundit: lol, I would like to put a "thumb up" a la YouTube, it's missing, here!
Posted by: https://me.yahoo.com/a/PbW94bQ7hfDDpgZIW3U_hMjFlIlrQRqxDkwdPxjeJX9Bt9yQZ6yJi6Qwhij8ldlG#35d13
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October 14, 2009 3:49 PM
Higgs' Boson or Carroll's Boojum?
I’ll probably never get to visit those man-made grottoes beneath the fields of France and Switzerland.
But, I believe that there is a CERN. And CERN begat LHC. The Large Hadron Collider -- more than 20 years abuilding and perhaps € 6.4 billion to construct, including cost overruns.
LHC is the latest instrument for a “hunting of the Snark.” True believers in the ultimate simplicity of Nature and Nature’s Laws seek an elusive, perhaps non-existent, certainly evanescent entity.
“The Snark [might be] a Boojum, you see?”
Well, not exactly. The Snark should be a Boson, you know. A Higgs Boson. Known irreverently as the “god particle.”
Something omnipresent yet conspicuously absent. Something to be sought with “pitchforks and Hope.” Something which must be because Higgs demonstrated that it must. If this sounds a little like the ontological argument for God, don’t be surprised.
Whatever the outcome of the grand Snark hunt, the sheer beauty and fearful symmetry of its construction must rank LHC among the world’s great architectural masterpieces.
from:"The Vanishing"
In the midst of the word he was trying to say,
In the midst of his laughter and glee,
He had softly and suddenly vanished away --
For the Snark was [Higgs' Boson], you see.
Lewis Carroll. The Hunting of the Snark. An Agony in Eight Fits. 1876.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/03/god-particle/achenbach-text/
Posted by: time-entangled
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October 14, 2009 3:49 PM
The New York Times has just been trolled by two theoretical physicists.
Of course this is one giant leg pull!
Posted by: Lynna, OM
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October 14, 2009 3:50 PM
@48
LOL. My vote for thread Win goes to the quote above.
Posted by: SEF
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October 14, 2009 3:56 PM
It looks like a physicist joke to me.
Posted by: Feynmaniac
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October 14, 2009 3:59 PM
Pffft, a physicist would never do that!
Posted by: Nanu Nanu
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October 14, 2009 4:01 PM
Just don't try to find it's mass. I don't want to live on a super dense, pea-sized planet.
Posted by: Nebula99
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October 14, 2009 4:01 PM
That actually makes sense, SEF. Probably setting out to demonstrate the corollary to Clarke's third law I described above. They did a pretty good job of it, too: the Times is generally good at avoiding woo and other failure. Of course, it will come out that they were wrong/joking when the collider actually works and finds the blasted boson already.
Posted by: sizzzzlerz
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October 14, 2009 4:09 PM
I understand the Higgs Boson conjecture will be the basis of the technology used by Skynet to send the terminator back in time kill Sarah Conner.
Or am I mixing earth timelines here?
Posted by: Nova
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October 14, 2009 4:19 PM
#4@rlrr
This is actually very important, it seems very convenient that the way the laws of reality happens to block the creation of Higgs boson is one so easily comprehensible in our tiny middle world, a way even that seems appropriate for soft Sci Fi... The actual activation of the collider seemed important to us in the quest to find Higgs boson, but in the sequence of events that would have lead to the creation of Higgs boson in the collider why was it privileged over any other as the event reality had to sabotage, as rlrr said, why not prevent life from evolving instead? That would do the job. Or create some tiny anomaly that we can hardly detect. It seems ridiculous that the way reality would avert the creation of Higgs boson happens to be so easily perceivable by us.Posted by: Pierce R. Butler
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October 14, 2009 4:21 PM
So when they turn this gizmo on, it will kill Higgs's grandfather?
Posted by: aduzik.myopenid.com
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October 14, 2009 4:25 PM
It would nice to know that every time I make something that doesn't work, it wasn't because I was a bonehead, it's because it would be abhorrent to nature. Nature is kind of a dick, huh?Posted by: Dianne
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October 14, 2009 4:25 PM
It's a Poe. Not even a Poe, a joke. Like the Mars demon, except that people took it seriously.
But while we're on crazy physics theories*, here's my explanation of the multiple failures of Mars probes: deep within NASA and/or its contractors exists the anti-Mars underground, an organization dedicated to making sure that people NEVER land on Mars. They sabatoge as much as possible.
*Theory in the common usage sense, aka wild ass guess, not the scientific usage.
Posted by: jjr1993p2
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October 14, 2009 4:28 PM
"...like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather."
Pshaw, that just creates an alternate timeline...everybody knows THAT...
;-)
I remember one of the Star Trek writers being asked "so, how do transporters work?"
Answer: "They work very well, fine thank you very much."
Posted by: MrFire
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October 14, 2009 4:46 PM
made up of these guys?
...please watch 'til 2:38 at least. PLEASE.
Posted by: John Morales
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October 14, 2009 5:41 PM
SciencePundit @14,
Been done.
Posted by: W DeWitt
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October 14, 2009 5:43 PM
PZ, I think it is a joke. They introduce a complex-valued action to the Feynman path integral, declare it to be "great/nice", then conclude that we should prefer to devise a card game to determine the future of the LHC rather than subject it to potential funding crises or dangerous accidents. It would have been more inventive if, instead of the card game, they asked us to get out a ouij board to communicate with future Higgs particles.
The 'joke' is clearly lost on Overbye though - his article is asinine.
Posted by: NewEnglandBob
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October 14, 2009 5:52 PM
I solved this problem 30 years ago. What is this problem?
Posted by: Brownian, Most Vicious & Petty of Pharyngulites
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October 14, 2009 6:17 PM
Nova wrote @#61:
Exactly. Which link in the change is nature going to sabotage? Is the 'On' switch going to be impossible to flip, the factory that manufactures those really tiny hex nuts going to spontaneously explode, the invention of writing prove to be impossible, the Chicxulub bolide deflected at the last moment, Snowball Earth never to thaw, Sol never to ignite, or the universe never to form?
Posted by: Jason Dick
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October 14, 2009 6:28 PM
Yeah, this is really a silly argument. If it were true that Higgs bosons could not be created due to a back reaction through time, then all that would happen is that in any collision that might generate a Higgs boson, this back reaction would force the amplitude for the creation of the Higgs to be zero, so that other stuff would always happen instead, and you'd never get a Higgs.
There's no conceivable way that it would stop the operation of the entire collider. That's just silly.
Posted by: Abelard
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October 14, 2009 6:58 PM
Yawn...this proposal is not even recent news...but the NYT article makes it seem like its new. See Tommaso Dorigo's 2007 comments about the proposal at
http://dorigo.wordpress.com/2007/07/21/respectable-physicists-gone-crackpotty/
and Peter Woit's recent comments:
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/
Posted by: druidbros
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October 14, 2009 7:22 PM
Gotta love theoretical physics. Would someone please prevent me from marrying my practice wife?
Posted by: amphiox
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October 14, 2009 7:33 PM
"They work very well, fine thank you very much."
Ah, but do they, really?
If we assume that the episodes of Star Trek constitute a random sample of everyday life in Starfleet, and we take the number of episodes in which a major transporter malfunction occurs, well, I don't know the exact numbers off the top of my head, but it's not a success ratio that would convince me to routinely trust my atoms to that infernal device.
Posted by: amphiox
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October 14, 2009 7:39 PM
Last Hussar, #15: "Best open wide prof- Sub Atomic Physics is full of stuff that is counter-intuitive yet true."
But PZ never said he would refuse to swallow, now did he? He just wants there to be something substantial to chew on first, you know.
Posted by: Last Hussar
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October 14, 2009 8:32 PM
Important Message from the Time Travel Regulatory Agency.
The committee ask you not to try to kill your own Grandfather for YOUR peace of mind.
It is obviously impossible to kill your own Grandfather before your parent was conceived- the gun jams, it's mistaken identity, or in one extreme case, a piano being played by an elephant falls on your head.
However if you do manage to kill your Grandfather before your parent is conceived, there is obviouly only one conclusion- he was not a blood relative. This means your Nan must have 'put it about a bit' as a lass. The psychological damage this does can be very painful. Therefore, for your own mental stability, we respectfully ask you NOT TO TRY.
Posted by: DLC
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October 14, 2009 8:42 PM
The Higgs Boson isn't dead, it's just pinin for the Fjords.
(in honor of Monty Python's 40th anneversary )
Posted by: Peter G.
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October 14, 2009 8:45 PM
Ouch! Thinking about about this has seriously disturbed my unitarity. I feel all electroweak in the knees. I need a pick me up. A Hamiltonian on rye should do the trick.
Posted by: Nebula99
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October 14, 2009 9:05 PM
"If we assume that the episodes of Star Trek constitute a random sample of everyday life in Starfleet, and we take the number of episodes in which a major transporter malfunction occurs, well, I don't know the exact numbers off the top of my head, but it's not a success ratio that would convince me to routinely trust my atoms to that infernal device."
Technology marches on, though. By Next Generation they really did work fine.
Another PSA from the Time Travel Regulatory Agency:
If you attempt to go back and kill Hitler as a baby, then you will inevitably fail. If we somehow fall asleep at the wheel, then the Holocaust will never happen, Hitler's evil will never be known, and you will announce your triumph to the world only to be prosecuted for murder and/or sent to the loony bin. So don't try it. If you need more convincing, look at our track record for stopping the n00bs who try this:
http://www.abyssandapex.com/200710-wikihistory.html
Posted by: Squirel52
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October 14, 2009 9:07 PM
As a physicist, it hurts my head to hear such stupidity from "otherwise distinguished" sources. The Higgs boson, if it even exists, already exists all over the place - they are what regulate our conception of mass. We cannot observe them directly, only infer their creation through "missing" energy during high energy collisions. To say that their existence is abhorrent to nature is simply to state that they don't exist, and as such cannot be created. That won't cause the machine to break, merely to do exactly as it was designed to yet show us nothing.
"Ripples through time" sounds like one of those phrases made up by uncomprehending media people who completely fail to comprehend otherwise sensible work.... though perhaps i give the authors of this paper too much credit
Posted by: Peej255
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October 14, 2009 9:42 PM
I was gonna write something comprehensive but then i read #80, just pretend i said that.
Posted by: hje
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October 14, 2009 9:47 PM
Isn't this sort of like the plot of "All Good Things" (last ST-TNG episode)? Of course Q had a hand in creating that anomaly as a test for Picard.
Posted by: nathaniel-tagg.myopenid.com
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October 14, 2009 9:53 PM
Squirel52 (#80)
I don't think that's right. The Higgs, if it exists, does not exist all over place.. at least, not the mass shell. That is, virtual Higgs exist all over the place, but not real ones.
Real ones are undoubtedly made in cosmic ray interactions all over the universe, but in the theory suggested all these interactions somehow fail to produce Higgs by random chance.
Posted by: Hyperon
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October 14, 2009 10:08 PM
I seem to recall hearing of a place like that. I think it's called "Europe", or something along those lines.Speaking for the UK (which is one of the fattest countries on the planet), we already have plenty of bike routes. Non-processed food is already cheap (for instance, rice is one of the cheapest options available). Work is already generally 40 hours or less. Slow food is already promoted over fast food (for instance, McDonalds gets undeservedly bad press). In fact I think America shares most of these traits, apart from the bike routes.
As for "walking infrastructures" -- do you live inside a volcano or something? Last I knew, the term in colloquial English for "walking infrastructure" was "ground".
Posted by: Gregory Greenwood
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October 14, 2009 10:08 PM
I know little about physics. This I freely admit. I do know that some of the theories out there sound spectacularly weird to the ears of laymen like myself.
But;
"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"
Seriously? This has the sound of the worst kind of dumbed down pseudi-science.
I like science fiction as much as the next person (OK, probably a lot more than the next person unless they are a fellow Uber-geek. There are more of us than you realise). My tolerence for silly sci-fi 'science' is evident from the fact that I am fully capable of watching an entire episode of Star Trek without once screaming at the television.
I do, however, like to keep science fiction seperate from actual science so far as possible. It minimises confusion all round. There are enough moronic misconceptions about science (anyone here rememeber the whole 'LHC is going to create a huge blackhole and kill us all' debacle?) without anymore being spawned so recklessly.
Posted by: Hyperon
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October 14, 2009 10:11 PM
Oh, what the fuck. Wrong thread. I hate Opera. This is the last straw. I'm going back to Firefox.
Posted by: tortorific
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October 14, 2009 10:35 PM
This actually happens a lot in physics, because quantum theory has a time component to the uncertainly principle and because it has yet to be reconciled with special (or general) relativity you get a lot of physicists trying to reconcile to two by mucking around with the concept of time.
If a physicist is intellectually dishonest they may claim that time simply moves in a way as to make it seem like [insert stupid claim]. Generally the problem lies in the fact that they don't understand probability and randomness which are counter-intuitive processes.
The idea is reversibility, if you open a box full of gas in a vacuum the gas will spread out, there is no reason why the gas will not then all go back into the box, but the chance of that happening is low. If you look at an individual wave function you cannot tell if you are watching it move forward or are watching it in rewind in any interaction all outcomes are possible and can be ascribed a probability, but when you view multiple particles you can tell which way time is running because the different probabilities add up. What these guys are suggesting is that it's pretty much the same sending a signal forwards or backwards which is a bit silly.
Posted by: woozy
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October 15, 2009 1:21 AM
Hmm, but PZ is a biologist, isn't he? So maybe he can answer this:
It is impossible for a time traveler to be his/her own ancestor, isn't it?
I mean biologically, not physics-ally right? I mean, that'd mean ones offspring having the exact same DNA as the pro-genitor. That's gotta be impossible, yeah?
I mean, my travelling back in time and getting it on with my mother and becoming my own father as (time travel aside) every bit as unlikely or likely as my *not* travelling back in time and getting it on with my mother and having a son with my exact DNA.
Um, I suppose it's theoretically possible to have a kid and by some freak 2 to the god knows how many genes odd, the kid ends up with *none* of the mothers genes but... I mean, come on!!!!
Seems obvious to me but I've never heard *any*one come up with this argument when it occurs on Red Dwarf, Star Trek, Futurama, Man who folded himself, Kate and Leopold, etc, etc, etc.
Posted by: John Morales
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October 15, 2009 1:38 AM
Woozy, you need to read the classics.
—All You Zombies— by Heinlein.
Posted by: Feynmaniac
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October 15, 2009 2:07 AM
A much more serious issue are the holodecks. As pointed out in Futurama, half the time they are turned on they lose control and it takes over the ship. Seems like a high price to pay for a recreational system.
And when in the future does humanity lose fuse/circuit breaker technology? The bridge crew must be covered in burns from overloads.
Posted by: Desert Son
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October 15, 2009 2:12 AM
Off-topic for this thread, for which I apologize.
In case Hyperon is still reading Pharyngula, additional recommended reading:
Flower, L. (2003). Talking across difference: Intercultural rhetoric and the search for situated knowledge. College Composition and Communication, 55 (1), pp.38-68.
Gilroy, P. (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Prendergast, C. (2000). The water in the fishbowl: Historicizing Ways with Words. Written Communication, 17 (4), pp. 452-490.
No kings,
Robert
Posted by: woozy
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October 15, 2009 2:50 AM
—All You Zombies— by Heinlein.
Don't know how I missed that one. Um, so when a snail mates with itself, the offspring is a genetic clone? So this only works if you mate with oneself, right? Can't be ones own grandparent unless you are also both ones own mother and father? (In which case it'd be inevetible I guess.)
Posted by: sdh
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October 15, 2009 2:59 AM
"Flower, L. (2003). Talking across difference: Intercultural rhetoric and the search for situated knowledge. College Composition and Communication, 55 (1), pp.38-68.
Gilroy, P. (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Prendergast, C. (2000). The water in the fishbowl: Historicizing Ways with Words. Written Communication, 17 (4), pp. 452-490."
Or you could just abort a fetus. Either way, you're still a liberal
Posted by: JackC
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October 15, 2009 3:09 AM
"...All You Zombies..." one of my absolute favourites by The Master. That one, and nearly everything else he wrote. I think this weekend I will have to go out and find a large anthology of Heinlein and re-read everything.
I need something to cleanse the palate having just finished slogging through "The Lost
PlotSymbol"JC
Posted by: John Morales
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October 15, 2009 3:13 AM
[OT]
re the Star Trek transporters: There're bigger plot holes than that. E.g. Since they store a 'pattern'¹, doesn't that mean everyone could have a backup in case of accident? Doesn't that mean one could make multiple copies of oneself? etc.
--
¹ Admittedly, in ToS, there were 'buffers' and presumably it was an analog teleportation, but even then...
Posted by: Phodopus
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October 15, 2009 4:45 AM
I think #71 hit the nail on the head, Taking such a hypothetical many-worlds scenario for granted, simply observing zero production cross sections for Higgs Bosons seems much more likely than having a complicated chain of events causing the failure of machinery far removed from the actual particle interaction. One would have to do the math, though, because it might be possible that such anthropically skewed particle production amplitudes might actually be observable indirectly as a violation of unitarity, Bell inequalities or something of the kind, I'm not sure though ...
Posted by: SEF
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October 15, 2009 5:01 AM
@ woozy #88:
It doesn't have to be none of the mother's genes. It might merely be the case that the half of the mother's chromosomes the offspring did receive in the egg happened to match the ones missing from the set inherited from the father in the sperm.
Among other extreme implausibilities, this would require that any swapped over sections of chromosome from the father were either identical in each original one or the difference was correctable and corrected with simple mutations in the initial divisions of the resultant zygote (and any incorrect lineage cells then lost or not sampled).
It does work for either sex though - in that one could equally implausibly seem to have just the mother's genes and none of the father's. Eg looking at just the sex chromosomes, an XY father and an Xx mother (where the X really is identical in each) can generate both Y+X and X+x.
Posted by: Peter Ashby
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October 15, 2009 6:40 AM
@Hyperon
That is the attitude that built the baroque monstrosity that is String Theory. A truly magnificent work of art, like all really good literature it is internally consistent, and like all true fiction unconnected with reality. What physicists of a theoretical bent seem to forget is that Mathematics is a language. Yes it is an arcane sort of language, but a language nonetheless, just as Boolean logic is. You can use Boolean to make perfectly logically consistent arguments, which can be refuted by showing a critical premise to be a load of fetid dingo kidneys thus rendering all that consistent logic superfluous.
That is what happens when you start looking for evidence in your theory instead of in nature. The problem with theoretical physics is that when your snark is shown to be a boojum you don't softly and suddenly vanish away, never to be met with again. You just recalculate and chase the next snark. When you have turned over all the spaces in the energies where the Higgs might be hiding with a wizz bang Acme Higgs Detector, you will simply go to Plan Theta and hit the public purses for another multibillion Euro machine to hunt with.
There's a reason I'm a biologist, I know that what I work on exists because if I don't handle it carefully it will bite me or squirt blood at my safety glasses. If the band I'm getting with my pcr looks dodgy I can see if it cuts to the right sizes with this restriction enzyme or I can clone it and sequence it. They are promising we can soon sequence things directly which will mean I won't even have to clone it to sequence it. That is useful physics, now step away from those calculations and get thee working on that atomic force microscope.
Posted by: Phodopus
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October 15, 2009 7:07 AM
@ Peter Ashby #98
What a delightfully ignorant rant. No, there are reasons to look for Higgs bosons, and they have nothing to do with String speculations and everything with observation. The trouble is, to recognize that broken electroweak symmetry (the reason why one expects things like the Higgs boson) is there in nature maybe requires a little more subtle involvement with nature than choking a lab rat until it vomits blood onto your petri dish. Maybe that's why I'm a physicist :)
Posted by: Hyperon
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October 15, 2009 7:36 AM
Wow. Truly a stupendous display of stupidity and arrogance. What on Earth makes you, a biologist, feel you have the training to decide whether or not string theory is connected with reality? Yes. What makes you think this piddling bromide of an insight is somehow inaccessible to physicists? Obviously if "consistency" were the only thing string theory had going for it, nobody save cranks would take it seriously. Billions of dollars were also spent on the Human Genome Project. Nearly two decades on, and it turns out biologists didn't learn nearly as much as they forecasted. Physicists aren't the only scientists who spend money. Bear in mind that physicists have been begging (usually without success) for a machine like the LHC ever since the Superconducting Super Collider was planned around 1983.By the way, what makes you so sure that we won't find the Higgs?
That's clearly a ridiculous reason for pursuing a scientific subject. Testament to nothing but your own narrow intellectual boundaries if you're parochial enough to believe it is essential to physically touch the objects in one's theories in order to be sure they exist.Posted by: Bernard Bumner
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October 15, 2009 7:56 AM
I'm sorry, but whatever the merits of the rest of your post, this is simply untrue.
(Still, I would not presume to dismiss the work of physical theorists.)
Posted by: Phodopus
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October 15, 2009 8:05 AM
Yeah, yeah, pointing at the other disciplines saying "they waste taxpayers' money, too!" is fortunately not the best argument for fundamental research. It's a PR no-no in any case. However, I somehow can't resist comparing the LHC to things like this, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7928949.stm :)
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
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October 15, 2009 8:09 AM
Yawn, Hyperon still doesn't have a clue. The HGP is still being analyzed. The knowledge to be gained there is an ongoing project, and probably will be for another 50 years or so.
Until string theory and the like become consistent with reality, and explain reality on all levels, they remain theoretical. They aren't sacred.
Posted by: Peter Ashby
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October 15, 2009 8:10 AM
Hee, hee, touched a couple of nice sensitive nerves there, didn't I? So then if String Theory is so wonderful describe an achievable experiment that can disprove it.
The search for the Higgs is at least experimental physics, but I subscribe to New Scientist and am well aware that the theoretical guys are already working on a plan theta in case Higgs is not found. IOW its existence is not so cast in mathematical stone because finding the Higgs is also about testing the hypotheses that predict the existence of the Higgs. This is what many people seem to forget. It is almost as though the testing of hypotheses is no longer the domain of experimental high energy physics. This is what I mean when I wrote my tongue in cheek piece.
It is nice to see that those who have forgotten that there is an unconfirmed hypothesis underlying the search for the Higgs are unashamed to parade their ignorance.
Now back to work on that microscope my good geek minions or there will be no steampunk before bedtime for you.
Posted by: Phodopus
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October 15, 2009 9:06 AM
I agree that the way the search for "the Higgs boson" is presented to the general public (and also the way it is rests all too firmly in some physicists minds) is problematic, for several reasons:
1. It makes it appear as though the LHC, and particle physics in general would somehow have failed in case "it" is not found. The opposite is true, finding something else in its stead would give better insights than the comparably boring find of a single Higgs boson, which would leave so many questions unanswered.
2. All too often, the operation (for example) of the LHC is marketed as a silly "search for the Holy Grail" equivalent. This way of presenting the matter gives the whole endeavour an extremely unscientific appearance which it doesn't deserve, sacrificing the subtle questions for the sake of letting it sound exciting Hollywood style (with the appropriate soundtrack, Hans Zimmer comes to mind).
3. It misses the interesting scientific point! We don't know what will be found at these new experiments. We DO know with great certainty that there is this broken symmetry present in nature because the assumption has produced so many successful predicions, and could have easily been falsified.
So, what is actually investigated at the LHC is a much deeper question than the search for [insert silly name for Higgs bosons], namely the origin of a hidden symmetry principle in nature the implications of which we have observed for decades. The commonly publicized model of this symmetry breaking, the one with "the Higgs Boson", is merely one surprisingly successful, simple and consistent construction you can write down to accomodate the large body of known facts from precision measurements.
Alternatives to it have been sought since the '70s, but none of them work as well, which is the origin of the confidence most of the community has in the existence of "the Higgs Boson".
Posted by: nigelTheBold, Minister of Spankings
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October 15, 2009 9:09 AM
I remember reading how simple and elegant string theory is, how it was going to solve all the problems with quantum mechanics. I read this back in the early 80s.
Today, over two decades later, string theory has become a jumbled mess. Problem is, it's not even a theory -- it's an hypothesis. You have the N-Brane model as a sort-of aggregate string theory, yet it too has failed to make any currently-testable predictions. (If we could unravel the dimensions wrapped up in a fermion, we might have a usable test.)
I'm starting to think Lee Smolin is correct. The single-vision fascination physicists have with string theory is unhealthy. There are other, competing hypothesis (loop quantum gravity, causal dynamical triangulation, and so forth) that are just as likely as, and currently more elegant than, string theory (which is really just an hypothesis).
Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
Posted by: Phodopus
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October 15, 2009 9:22 AM
The single-vision fascination physicists have with string theory is unhealthy
Define physicists. ST (the kind which is supposed to unify all forces) is less popular than you might think, for the precise reasons mentioned above. There are theories in the field which actually do make predictions, and for those all the expensive machines are built. My feeling is that ST now plays the role of a diffuse source of inspiration more than anything else.
Posted by: sailor1031
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October 15, 2009 10:07 AM
all of this weird physics stuff comes from the fact that mathematics allows things to be thinkable if not always picturable - like the ten (or is it eleven) dimensions required by string theory. It doesn't mean that it's real anymore than the negative root of a quadratic is real. An electron moving forward in time may be pictured as a positron moving backward in time but it ain't really so since both are governed by the rules of reality rather than everything allowed by mathematics. SaraJ has of course Identified the essential impossibility of this.
Posted by: Phodopus
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October 15, 2009 10:16 AM
@sailor
An electron moving forward in time may be pictured as a positron moving backward in time but it ain't really so
Ah, it ain't really so, huh? You make the same mistake, giving such mathematical constructs a reality value. Either it is an assumption which you can use to make a prediction, or not.
superstring's 10D btw, 11D is a maximal supergravity dimension, no strings attached ;)
Posted by: David Marjanović
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October 15, 2009 12:40 PM
Ehem… excuse me. You're on the Internet here. We cannot see your tongue. We can't find out where it is, unless you take great care to describe where it is. What you wrote can be read with a straight face; for you to then come and say "it was all a joke" could easily and parsimoniously interpreted in highly uncharitable ways.
I would say it is a theory, because it's simply so big. It aims to explain the entire universe. The theory of combustion by phlogiston with negative mass was also a theory…
Posted by: a_ray_in_dilbert_space
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October 15, 2009 12:59 PM
You know, guys, I'm a physicist. I work with physicists, and I don't know even one who is emotionally invested in String Theory. It's a cool theory. It makes a lot of problems go away that we learned to hate in grad school. So, it would be kind of cool if it were true. However, if it is not true, whatever theory takes its place will be cool as well.
Now, as to the NY Times piece, I think they been punked. This is the sort of thing that physicists giggle about over coffee. Yeah, we're weird.
Posted by: Peter Ashby
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October 15, 2009 1:15 PM
@ David Marjanović
Oh and various points like "with a wizz bang Acme Higgs Detector" and the snark at the end make it look like an 'entirely serious' piece do they? I assure you that if you look up my publishing record (such as it is) you will not find language like that. Do yours? if so it might explain your point, otherwise . . .
I have a wizz bang Acme Higgs Detector (slightly singed) I can let you have at a knock down price (I keep stubbing my toe on it in the garage).
Posted by: Hyperon
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October 15, 2009 2:54 PM
That is one of the major criticisms of string theory, and a valid point. It does not, however, even remotely justify your outrageous, bottomless assertion that string theory is "unconnected with reality". New Scientist is for the most part sensationalist trash, so don't expect me to be impressed. That's probably where you get your highly distorted conception of physics. I haven't forgotten anything of the sort. You were the one who originally professed to certainty: I asked you what makes you so confident this will happen. Not my fault if you can't get your words right the first time.Posted by: David Marjanović
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October 15, 2009 3:30 PM
I thought that was simply ridicule. Hyperbole, you know. Like saying "stupid creationists (but I repeat myself)".
Posted by: Kagehi
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October 15, 2009 5:34 PM
Difference between these clowns and like "sane" physicists is that sane ones talk about things like how black holes may not actually "form" singularities. Seems that quantum effects may prevent this, producing a "black star" instead. It gives of radiation, similar to Hawkins' Radiation, and appears to be just like a classical black hole. However, its really like a layered mass of matter, each layer hotter, as you go towards the center, and all generating so much gravity that, as with a normal one, nothing, other than its own radiation, can escape it.
Interestingly, this and several other non-classical versions of black holes all imply (at least as far as I can tell, though I am not an expert on the matter) that its probably not feasible to produce them in a collider, never mind have it remain intact long, if you did. Just not enough mass to have it happen.
Posted by: Silič O'Nopolitanopoulos, Färschdbischuf Beesknees aus Ulm und Klein Elguth, Elector Pharynguline.
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October 15, 2009 5:59 PM
DAVIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIID!!!
:does happydance:
Posted by: Silič O'Nopolitanopoulos, Färschdbischuf Beesknees aus Ulm und Klein Elguth, Elector Pharynguline.
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October 15, 2009 6:20 PM
I retract my earlier defence. Definitely gone crackpot.
Posted by: amphiox
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October 15, 2009 7:31 PM
"it's not even a theory -- it's an hypothesis."
I am inclined to disagree with this, and side with David Marjanovic #110. While I agree with the generally accepted wisdom and theory and hypothesis are two grades of the same kind of thing, I do not think that amount, validity, or rigor of supporting evidence is the proper measure that differentiates them.
A theory is a framework that systematically explains and organizes a wide range of observations, and it is this breadth of explanatory power that to my mind distinguishes theory from hypothesis, which is much less ambitious in its scope.
Something like String Theory, even if it "hypothetically" had absolutely no evidence supporting it, would still be a theory (though undoubted one of pretty shaky ground if the evidence continues not to turn up.)
Posted by: amphiox
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October 15, 2009 7:39 PM
#95:
I'm in agreement with you there. And if we accept the transporter tech as described, then the Star Trek writers (or the Federation engineers?) have missed out on a lot of useful applications.
Like transporter based surgery, for example. You ought to be able to do virtual surgery on the transporter data, and reconstitute the individual on the other end with, say, the malignant brain tumor removed, or all the deadly infectious bacteria erased. Individuals should be able to "bank" a healthy copy of themselves (part of their annual check-up?) so that if they get ill later, they can reset their bodies by running through the transporter - you can digitally graft the healthy parts over the injured/diseased parts, keeping the current parts you need or want not to change, like pattern of brain activity, etc, and basically no one in the Star Trek universe should ever fall ill, be disabled, or have any permanent injury, ever.
Posted by: Kel, The Privileged View From Nowhere
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October 15, 2009 7:52 PM
Speaking of physicists being "weird", one of my workmates directed me to something called process physics. Is there something to this?
Posted by: Pacal
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October 15, 2009 8:02 PM
Actually the old time travel conundrum of going back and time and killing your Grandfather is quite a soft version of how absurd from a common sense point of view time travel is.
To illustrate:
A) I build time machine go back 5 minutes before I activated time machine. I then kill myself before I entered time machine to go back to kill myself.
B) I burn a cord of wood in fire place until it is reduced to ash. I enter time machine go back to before cord of wood is burned. Take cord of wood go back to time just after I entered time machine. Burn cord of wood to ash, then go back in time etc., etc. forever burning same cord of wood over and over again.
C) I build time machine go, back 3 minutes, pick up myself, we both enter time machine, go forward, or back repeat until machine is filled to capacity with dozens, hundreds etc., of me.
D) I build time machine go back in time to louve, take Mona Lisa, go backwards or forwards in time, to Louve take Mona Lisa each time until I have hundreds of Mona Lisa's.
Posted by: woozy
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October 15, 2009 8:25 PM
#97:
It doesn't have to be none of the mother's genes. It might merely be the case that the half of the mother's chromosomes the offspring did receive in the egg happened to match the ones missing from the set inherited from the father in the sperm.
Okay, this might seem silly, but I'm serious.
I'm not a biologist so I don't know but I'd really like to know if it's biologically possible for a time-traveller to be ones own ancestor. Am I correct in assuming this would be equivalent to someone's progeny having identical biological make-up? Am I correct in assuming this is impossible? Even if I assume the person can mate with his/her mother, father, sister, grandfather, *self*? Would this ever be possible?
I mean, despite *thousands* of time-travel stories, this would be impossible on a *solely* biological basis, right? wrong?
Posted by: SEF
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October 16, 2009 5:12 AM
I was already attempting to take you seriously (when other people were ignoring your point).
For being one's own ancestor all along, ignoring the causality problem(!), one would indeed have to have the identical biological make-up. For merely replacing one's ancestor retrospectively, eg after an unfortunate time-travel accident led to the original being out of the scene, one need only have a sufficiently compatible biological make-up - to replace those genes (including the "junk" parts of the DNA) of the ancestor which were actually used in making subsequent offspring.
No. Biologically, it's merely ludicrously implausible and not completely impossible.
Posted by: SEF
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October 16, 2009 5:35 AM
@ Kel #120:
I'm somewhat mixed on that one. The blurb at the top is so badly written as to resemble many things written by bluffers. You probably know the sort of thing I mean from elsewhere - manager-speak and the use of "paradigm". Actually, in the middle of editing this bit (with my conclusion already part finished below this!) I'm now very tempted to feed the page into the quackometer just to see how it fairs against that relatively unintelligent assessment of content (which was designed for a different type of quackery) ...
... and the quackometer said it scored zero, ie had none of the particular canards for which they are looking in kooky stuff. And now back to the rest of the interrupted post ...
However, in the more concrete examples given below the blurb, eg on doppler shift and dark matter, he/they are considering exactly the same sorts of things as I have in physics (and, freakily, which I was only just the other day complaining to myself had been lacking in published stuff!). So they could be doing very real work indeed but merely be rubbish at explaining it, ie they're trying to sell it to some other sort of market. If they're for real than I'm very glad they exist to be doing what I wanted someone to be doing!
It remains to be seen whether or not they're "right" though.
Posted by: Kel, OM | October 17, 2009 1:30 AM
Fair enough. I tried reading the first paper on it, realised my knowledge on physics is completely inadequate to assess such claims so I figured that I should ask on here where there are physicists who could tell me whether I'm wasting my time on quackery or if there's potential.
Posted by: alias Ernest Major | October 17, 2009 3:54 AM
It would probably fit better as a corollary to Clark's third law, which states: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Law 3a: Any sufficiently complex/recent physics concept is indistinguishable from one that's been made up.
The formulation that I use is that "sufficiently advanced physics is indistinguishable from nonsense". What is sufficiently advanced depends on the audience - for many people special relativity and quantum mechanics are beyond the threshold.
Posted by: Gregory Greenwood
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October 17, 2009 10:11 AM
"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.”"
When I read this particular excerpt of the article I began to get a bad feeling that we are heading into 'goddidit' territory, but later on they talk about another theory from Dr. Nielson about how the entire Universe could have arisen purely from randomness.
Maybe there is hope for him yet.
Posted by: Sphere Coupler | October 18, 2009 3:09 PM
If the Higgs Boson is responsible for giving other sub-atomic particles mass then by it's very nature is a construct relative to the Graviton which I have trouble accepting, more than likely the standard model which has worked so well up until now will be altered, expanded and left with open ended questions provided by the LHC.
The term Gravity has had a misleading conjecture since Newton, assumption have been made to allow progress without the full understanding of the concept, sometimes this is necessary to progress to a certain level and then reverse engineer the concepts to fit present day knowledge.It is a very useful tool to give a particle a point like position to allow mathimatical construct to be obtained, this does not mean that in reality, that any particle can be treated as a point particle. We can map the effects particles have on their surrounding enviroment and give that a name but this can be missleading to the layman.I would also speculate that to easily detect the (Higgs Boson) one would need to be as far from mass producing bodies as possible, or in other words to correctly see sub-atomic effects. This does not mean that the LHC is worthless, Indeed it will revolutionise science, if done safly and slowly.
(conjecture)
Gravity could be no more than phenomena created by the transition phase of sub atomic particles coupled with the 3 forces interacting at small dimensions and collectively contributing to the overall effect (shape).
Posted by: Sphere Coupler | October 18, 2009 3:48 PM
And since I'm on an older blog and am probably talking to myself I'll continue.
All known matter is constantly susceptible to a state of transition, even supercooled floods cannot reach absolute 0. If matter could reach the pressure and absence of heat it may not be directly observable.Even in the island of stability transition eventually will take place.
It is the accepted hypothesis that (some?) galaxies are surrounded by dark matter, This Dark Matter that is speculated to have the ability to form Galaxies could
(Contain normal matter in a Constant state of transition).
Of course I have no mechanism to show this.
And as an after thought I think that science has come a long way from individual competition, to coopertive progress on a theory, yet still seems to not accept and combine in a quantum veiw point rival theories and hypothisis that are not wrong but don't explain as much as the more popular theory when constructing models.
(no example)
Posted by: Sphere Coupler | October 18, 2009 5:37 PM
A question that has puzzled astrophysicist is the accelerated spin of other galaxies which...could be a local lensing effect of galaxies caused by the constant state of transition creating dark matter so that all attempts to view other galaxies would be altered to (the galaxy view)
The Dark Matter would act as a matter well,collecting matter as the state of constant transition is disupted at a specific rate controlled nonlocaly by the exspansion between galaxies, while dark energy would be the primer responsible for the Galaxy lensing effect.
As an easy to understand concept:
Much as our atmosphere alters the view of the sun's size at dawn or dusk is our (world view).
To properly view a galaxy is to use a universal view that lies outside a galaxy ,just as to properly view earth with our satellite detectors outside our atmosphere in the solar system.To view other galaxies from outside the Milky Way or adapt to the medium correctly that lies between us and other galaxies would vastly improve our over all knowledge of the Universe.Again much like the Hubble changed our view point void of atmospheric conditions.The goal is to understand the phenomena and allow amplification corrections and other corrections for better viewing and data retrieval.
There are five stages of thought development that need to occur,
Self-view, Worldview, Solarsystem veiw, Galaxy-view, Universal-view.
The above, to my knowledge is pure conjecture on my part.
Posted by: Sphere Coupler | October 18, 2009 6:13 PM
One could speculate that Dark Matter (sub-atomic particles in constant state of transition) was the initial state or close to the initial state of the primary event(big bang)and that all normal matter acting in a symmetry began condensing into normal matter at a specific point of time and still continues today in the Universal evolution.
No medium is completely observable while immersed in same such medium, due to quantum effects.
Posted by: Sphere...Coupler | October 18, 2009 6:59 PM
Whoops should read
"(big bang)and that all dark matter"
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
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October 18, 2009 7:14 PM
Sphere, I (we) missed you. Come to the endless thread. 11,000 posts is in sight...
Posted by: Sphere...Coupler | October 19, 2009 1:51 AM
OK, Time to fix my mistakes in 131.
One could speculate that Dark Matter (sub-atomic particles in constant state of transition) was close to the initial state of the primary event(big bang)and that some dark matter acting in symmetry began condensing into normal matter at a specific point of time, perhaps accelerated during inflation and still continues today in the Universal evolution.
Question is, considering the many variables could Dark and normal matter reach an equilibrium or at least a happy parameter, could the process reverse or have we reached equilibrium already.
No medium is completely observable while immersed in same such medium, due to quantum effects.