Altered states



As news goes, this is a bit old now, but seeing as no one else I know has posted about it, I thought I would.
Last weekend the papers mentioned the kind of thing that I absolutely love - It stopped me in my tracks and made my head spin for a few minutes trying to get to grips with the enormity of something so totally and utterly weird being mentioned in amongst all the other mundane things like politics and house prices.

To paraphrase from The Times:

The Large Hadron Collider, at CERN may be sabotaging itself from the future — twisting time to generate a series of scientific setbacks that will prevent the machine fulfilling its destiny.

The time travel idea has come from two distinguished physicists who have backed it with rigorous mathematics.

What Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, are suggesting is that the Higgs boson, the particle that physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be “abhorrent to nature”.

What does that mean? According to Nielsen, it means that the creation of the boson at some point in the future would then ripple backwards through time to put a stop to whatever it was that had created it in the first place.

This, says Nielsen, could explain why the LHC has been hit by mishaps ranging from an explosion during construction to a second big bang that followed its start-up.



Pretty cool huh? Obviously these two scientists have been partaking a bit too freely of the ether, but nevertheless, all credit to them for actually giving me something amazing to comprehend over my weekend cornflakes
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2 comments:

Gareth Williams said...

I always thought that something called the Large Hardon Collider was going to break. With a name like that it's just bound to be unwieldy and a bit out-of-control.

worm said...

a large hardon collision could make the entire world's eyes water at once