Time Travel Causing Bad Luck At The LHC

An amazing and bizarre theory has arisen out of our quest to understand mass.

What is mass? Why does mass exist? Where did mass come from? The answer may seem simple enough to obtain because we can feel mass all around us. However, explaining and proving why mass exists is one of the biggest problems facing physics today.

The Standard Model explains beautiful the nature of the subatomic world – the nature of reality around us at the smallest scale. But there is a problem: it does not explain mass. In fact, the theory, sound in all regards, works with all particles as massless. To explain mass the Higgs boson and subsequent field are predicted but have yet to be observed.

The Higgs boson is a very heavy elementary particle. It creates a field that imbues mass to all particles which have mass. Many particles like protons get slowed down in the field and gain mass from the field like being captured in a net while other particles like photons zip right through. Proving that the Higgs exists answers a key fundamental unsolved problem with the model of reality: what is and causes mass.

If the Higgs boson is not found, then science has hit a brick wall revealing we do not understand something deep and something fundamental about reality. This is ok though because scientists love challenges.

If the Higgs Boson is found then all is peachy.

To observe it a huge amount of energy is required to create the matter that will reveal this theoretical particle. In comes the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland.

The LHC is the world’s largest and strongest particle accelerator. It is also mankind’s largest and most epic scientific experiment in history. The LHC is intended to test the prediction of the Higgs Boson along with other hypothesized particles. The amount of energy the LHC creates as it slams subatomic particles into each other at nearly the speed of light has led to theories that it will also create black holes and worm holes. The amount of energy the LHC will create is equal to an aircraft carrier traveling at 14 knots. Imagine all that energy hitting a wall inside a tube the size of your wrist. Since energy and matter are interchangeable, the goal is to have that immense amount of energy be converted into very heavy rare particles like the Higgs boson that haven’t been seen in fourteen billion or so years.

Enter fiction… or not

If a black hole is created, although unlikely, it would likely evaporate in an instant after eating one particle. No issue here but the letters and emails pour in daily at CERN warning of imminent destruction of Earth if the LHC is switched on. Even a lawsuit was filed to prevent the LHC from operating due to the threat a voracious black hole poses to humanity. The reason this is a non-issue for physicists operating the collider is because it’s believed countless microscopic black holes pop into existence all the time all around us – even right in front of your nose. After eating a particle or two they evaporate. Since it happens all the time and Earth is still here there are no worries about a killer black hole being created in the LHC. What follows is far more interesting…

Time travel

The Standard Model predicts time travel yet obviously there are no time travelers here. Either we live inside an artificial reality like a software program that does not permit time travel even though it’s possible, or a real theory proposes that time travelers would fade out of existence when outside their time of origin, or more prominent theory states that time travel is not possible before the existence of time travel.

Let me put that last theory another way. Since we have no machine capable of time travel, time travelers cannot access our time. Time travel is only possible back to the creation date of the first time travel machine, not behind that moment. Reality only permits what is possible in that reality. Once time travel becomes a reality, time travel is possible in that reality from that time forward. Sorry, no riding dinosaurs in the Jurassic for you!

2010: The Year of Time Travel

If the LHC creates a worm hole that loops back in time then the LHC becomes the first time traveling machine. The worm hole will likely only connect back or forward in time a fraction of a fraction of a second, but that’s all that’s needed for time travel to become reality. From that moment on we could become host to some very interesting temporal tourists.

The Future Breaking The Machine

Now, this is where things get interesting.

The LHC keeps breaking. A cryogenic magnet support broke in 2007 delaying the startup date that was planned for November 2007. It was turned on and doing preliminary runs in September 2008 but a week later it broke again. After an expected repair time of several months another section broke pushing the operation start date even further. The LHC is slated to turn back on in winter of 2009/10.

About a year ago I half-jokingly stated to friends that the LHC is breaking because Consensus Reality does not except the potential results the LHC could create. Consensus Reality is what a group or culture chooses to believe and when enough people think something is true then it takes on a life of it’s own and becomes reality. Too many people refuse to except what the LHC can do and so deny that future by breaking the machine – coincidentally.

Then my jaw dropped.

Two otherwise distinguished physicists Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto and proposed that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by it’s own future. They suggest that the hypothesized Higgs boson which is the main reason this collider was built is “so abhorrent to nature that it’s creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it can make one.” Ya, you read that right. A future influence from the LHC causing present malfunctions. Chew on that for a while. I’ll wait.

They predict that “all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck.”

Another machine, the Superconducting Supercollider, also built to detect the elusive Higgs was canceled in 1993 after billions of dollars had already been spent. Dr Nielsen calls this an “anti-miracle” and further demonstration of the theory proposed.

A similar way (but different from the theory above) is to view this issue with the Higgs and the LHC using the Multiworlds Theory. The collider either creates the Higgs and destroys the Universe or the collider breaks and the Universe survives. Only the Universes that experience mechanical failure and malfunctions can consciousness exist in. This leads us here to the present Universe with a repaired collider set to turn on in a month or two.

Will the world end? Will the LHC create an apocalypse that will end the world? Perhaps those 2012 believers can make a connection between the on-going problems with the LHC and the future Mayan date 2012. I sure see plenty of 2012 books all over the bookstores so I know it’s a popular idea. I know there are doomsday believers out there. I remember them from 1999 when people where buying food supplies, generators, and gasoline for six months of darkness because of the Y2K bug. There will and always have been believes in world ending scenarios. I am not one of them because I choose to believe consciousness must persist in at least it’s current form. The world wont end. The drama created in thinking so creates an unhealthy mental attitude. The same goes for negative song lyrics, etc.

This blog is to show how amazing reality is. The future slapping the present? Awesome. The Universe will protect itself.

Everyone outside of these two physicists thinks the idea that the future is breaking the collider is crazy and unscientific. But some crazy things have ended up fact. Just think of Schrodinger’s Cat!

Two individuals smarter than I have proposed a similar idea I joked about has floored me. What has shocked me is not the similarity in ideas but that smarter people believe it to be a real possibility.

Will the machine break again this winter? Or will it finally turn on and search for the Higgs boson? We shall soon find out! We live in very exciting times.