Fate, time travel, billions of dollars, a ‘model for God,’ magnetic meltdowns, and al Qaeda—all related to a massive project by a bunch of physics nerds attempting to recreate one basic particle that may not even exist. I love this stuff.
I never bought Stephen Jay Gould’s whole thing about the world being quite big enough, thank you, for both science and religion as long as they were both good boys and girls and stayed on their own sides of the fence, played their own games, dealt with their own problems, and never kissed at the fence or took a roll in the grass. Where’s the fun in staying apart?
It’s at the borders and in the grass where all the good stuff happens; where all the dangers lurk. Remember the guys up on Galileo’s roof 400 years ago this August who wouldn’t look into his telescope for fear of seeing the evidence that would turn their geocentric view on its head? Come on, guys! Collisions, even of worldviews, can be productive; tensions can create new ideas!
Speaking of collisions, this week we have the ill-fated $9-billion Large Hadron Collider making headlines (well, at least an essay devoted to it in the New York Times Science section, which isn’t bad). This is that 18-mile underground loop in Switzerland designed to get protons moving so fast that when they collide they’ll produce a never before seen particle called the Higgs boson—perhaps. The collider’s been shut down for more than a year after its first attempt at making Higgs failed miserably, and last week one of the scientists working at the collider was arrested by French police for those possible terrorist connections mentioned above. But, this is just the beginning.
Two well-known physicists, Holger Boch Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya, have a wild idea they’ve posited in actual research publications. They hypothesize this particle, the Higgs boson, might be, well, hated by God. And hated by God to such an extent that if one occurred it would go back in time and stop itself from being made (perhaps through apparent mishaps, like the very meltdowns and terrorist infiltrations that have actually happened). To the physicists’ credit (or not), they didn’t postulate exactly what or how the Higgs production would be foiled, but they did make their back-in-time prediction before the meltdown or the arrest.
It’s hard to know what’s going on here. According to some physicists, time travel is theoretically possible, after all. The Times essay quotes Einstein as saying there’s really no separation or difference among the past, the present, and the future…
Perhaps it’s just a jealousy thing; physicists calling for attention. Over the last decades, biologists have been getting a lot more ink than physicists, pushing more intriguingly at the border of science and religion (see: cloning, stem cells, gene therapy, human genome project, evolution and creation, etc.).
And if time travel were really possible, and things in the future can really affect things in the past, how would we experimentally demonstrate this? Nielsen and Ninomiya actually propose a test they call ‘backward causation,’ using the collider itself as tester.
The experiment is to choose a random card that might put limitations on how the collider is run, and might lead to its total shutdown. If the chances are really low of actually picking a card that would shut it down or keep it working at levels that could never produce a Higgs particle, and that card was picked, well maybe that’s backward causation. Hmm… If this isn’t clear, note that in a recent follow-up paper, the same authors argue that this experiment can only result in success—or at least in apparent success.
Whatever else, you can’t say these guys aren’t having fun, pushing the limits, jumping the fences, getting some good ink. Go Higgs!
