DOOMSDAY IN REVERSE? (Large Hadron Collider)

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Is the future trying to save us from ourselves? A series of scientific papers that have been kicking around for a couple of years suggest that if the Large Hadron Collider ever were to find something that shattered the cosmos, the future universe might protect itself by sending a backward-causality wave to break the LHC, or at least warn us.

Sure enough, the LHC is broken - leading The New York Times' Dennis Overbye to wonder half-jokingly whether there was something to the claim after all.

Does that sound spooky? What if I told you that the idea of going back in time to derail out a world-ending particle collider goes back even farther, to a novel written about the fate of the long-canceled Superconducting Super Collider? And that the author of that book is a physicist who has been conducting research into ... backward causality?

To quote the actor Keanu Reeves, who has appeared in a couple of time-travel sagas himself: "Whooooa!" And just in time for Halloween!

Each piece of the puzzle is relatively mundane by itself, but when you put them all together, it could serve as the makings for a science-fiction story as way-out as anything you'd see in "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure," "FlashForward" or University of Washington physicist John Cramer's book, "Einstein's Bridge":

The papers on the LHC's potential effects were written by Holger Nielsen of Copenhagen's Niels Bohr Institute and Masao Ninomiya of Japan's Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics. They suggest that the LHC could produce exotic particles (such as the long-sought Higgs boson), and that producing those particles would somehow be so catastrophic that the event would send back a timeline-altering signal to avoid producing them in the first place. They even suggest that physicists create a card game that would determine whether the LHC is allowed to operate at the highest levels. The game would be designed with a minuscule chance of "losing," but if the physicists actually lose the game, the LHC would be limited to lower-energy collisions.

Nielsen and Ninomiya's papers were published on the arXiv preprint Web site, which is a clearinghouse for all sorts of papers (including suggestions that the LHC could create a time machine or lead to a relativistic hyperdrive). Just because a paper shows up on arXiv doesn't mean it's so. The big reason why the papers are getting a second look is because a helium leak and electrical breakdown forced the LHC to go dark just days after it started up. That's an example of old-fashioned forward causality. Nevertheless, the shutdown, plus the fact that the LHC won't reach full power for more than a year, has led some folks to grumble that the project is jinxed.

This isn't the first time a big particle-smasher has seemed jinxed. Back in 1990, the Superconducting Super Collider looked like the next big thing in physics - in fact, it would have been more powerful than the LHC. But Congress moved to cancel the project in 1993, due to cost concerns. Or was that the real reason?

In Cramer's book, "Einstein's Bridge," the Superconducting Super Collider ends up getting built - but it opens the door to problems coming in from a metaverse in a bad cosmic neighborhood. That sparks a desperate effort to hold those problems at bay, and change the collider's timeline if possible. Without going into the details, I'll just note that a similar plot twist finds its way into another novel about the Superconducting Super Collider titled "The God Particle."

Cramer is a particle physicist as well as a novelist and columnist, and one of his latest projects is to determine whether backward causality on a small scale is actually possible under the rules of quantum physics. At last report, he was still having trouble setting up the correct apparatus. But even if the experiment is a failure, he can still make use of the concept. As he told me a couple of years ago, "If it doesn't work, I will write a science-fiction novel where it does work. It's a win-win situation."

So what's the bottom line here? Almost nobody thinks the LHC poses a threat worth changing the past over. A lawsuit to stop the collider is still being considered on appeal, however, and as we get closer to the scheduled restart in mid-November, there may be a fresh surge of particle-physics paranoia. If that's the case, don't be surprised - and for heaven's sake, don't panic
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/ ... 01272.aspx

^^ That's not science. There isn't a shred of reality in any of it. The claims are so preposterous that I don't feel like indulging in debunking them. Such people are best ignored.

The whole idea of something from the future going back in time to throw a monkey wrench into the LHC is preposterous,
wouldn't that be a paradox if we destroyed the earth or the universe in the present, how could something from the future go
back into past if the future not there?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1

COLLIDER, LARGE HADRON is just before CONNOR, SARAH in the phonebook.

Merle ! !!
Since when did you become such a sci-fi relativistic philosopher ???

No worries about black holes!

I did a calculation about how heavy a black hole would have to be before there was any danger in growing faster than it radiates away when placed in solid rock with a density of 3000 kg/cubic meter, and the mass falls through the event horizon at the speed of light. The heavier the black hole, the slower it radiates (loses mass) and the larger its event horizon radius. It takes about a 500 pound black hole to absorb mass faster than it can radiate. The total energies involved in these collisions are much, much less than 500 pounds. Any black holes etc. that are created will disintegrate before they can do anything.

I'm afraid this just isn't the place to go looking for a doomsday machine!

Dark Matter = Less Radon

"It'll Be The New Clean." TM