Do you know anything about particle physics? Astrophysics? Physics? Well, even if you don't, if you're at this site you probably know a little bit about time travel (if not I'll direct you to Back to the Future, Flight of the Navigator, or any of a few thousand time travel films, but not Primer. At least not to start). If you haven't heard about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) I'll do my best to sum up what it does in a few words: it's a big ring that smashes atoms that move very very very fast at each other. Accelerating protons up to a very small fraction below the speed of light is pretty awesome, but just don't stare at the picture of the LHC below for too long because it looks like it might swallow you whole.
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| Will the LHC spell success or doom for mankind? Just kidding. But seriously, doesn't it look like a mechanical Sarlaac? |
So that's a brief back story for what the LHC does, and all of this was created as an attempt to discover the Higgs boson, also known as the 'God' particle. For more info on that I recommend you use Wikipedia or ask a friend in the physics department. Now as of yet, there as not been a detection of the Higgs boson, but despite this, the LHC has been getting some interesting press over the past few years. Most recently, from two scientists, Tom Weiler and Chui Man Ho, who claim that the LHC has the capability to send matter back in time (without the aid of a 1981 DeLorean, or plutonium). Furthermore, they claim their theory "doesn't violate any laws of physics", or rather the laws of physics we are currently aware of. In short, these two believe that when the Higgs boson is created, a second particle known as a Higgs singlet will also be created and will be able to navigate via a higher, fifth dimension, either forward or backward in time.
Weiler claims this does not violate any of the large paradoxes that are associated with time travel, such as the Grandfather Paradox--you travel back in time to kill your grandfather before your father is born and therefore you are not born, negating you ever traveling back in time in the first place to kill your grandfather--because no man can travel through time other than you are currently doing. However, Weiler also states that this particle could be used to send messages either forward or backward in time, much like in Gregory Benford's novel [Timescape], but how this prevents you from sending a message back in time to tell someone to kill your grandfather is unclear (not that I am in anyway suggesting that).
How exactly do Weiler and Ho hope to prove their theory correct? If a Higgs singlet is spontaenously detected then they will likely be traveling back in time to a point before the actual collision that created them. Sounds a bit crazy right? Well, these two aren't the first to come up with an idea like this. In 2009, a year after malfunctions in LHC equipment required a shutdown, Holger Bech Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya put for the idea that the Higgs boson itself was causing damage to the particle accelerator. How? The Higgs boson was performing it's own Grandfather Paradox (or I guess Father Paradox?) and going back in time to a point before it was created in the LHC and stop it. Their argument being that the Higgs boson might be "so abhorrent to nature that it's creation would ripple backward through time.Look, I'm all for time travel, but I'm not easily ready to jump to it as a solution to mechanical problems in a massive particle accelerator. Nielsen and Ninomiya claim their equations work, of course this was just under 2 years ago, and since then there hasn't much talk about the apparently suicidal (though is it suicide if you stop yourself from being born?) Higgs boson. Still, Weiler and Ho do have an interesting idea. Whether or not it is true, well we'll have to wait for that, unless someone from the future wants to send a message back to us letting us know whether or not it's true.
Oh and just so you know, I'm not a particle physicist, though I am an astrophysicist, so while the inner workings of the LHC and higher dimensions are a little above my pay grade, that doesn't mean I don't understand them (or at least claim to).
[Physorg.com] & [NYTimes]
Dream on.
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