Of hadrons and bosons
I had a dream about particle physics last night. I woke up with a large hadron.
Sorry about that, please don’t report me to the comedy police. I’m just excited by the suggestion that the large hadron collider could be sabotaging itself from the future. The idea being that, were it to work, it would produce Higgs bosons. And the universe finds the idea of Higgs bosons so abhorrent that their appearance would send ripples back in time to prevent their coming into being.
I’m no physicist, but I note this is being suggested relatively seriously, by people who are proper physicists, or at least have published it on arXiv. It is fair to say however that it is not a widely accepted theory, especially among people working on the large hadron collider.
But doesn’t it open up a whole new wonderful universe of excuses? You need no longer claim that your dog ate your homework. Instead you can claim that were your homework completed, the universe would have been distressed and so prevented you from doing it. Who is going to argue with the universe (multiverses, of course, are a different matter)?
Just how general is this effect? And how does it relate to the fact that things sometimes just ‘don’t work’, to use the technical term. To put it another way, I have noticed a particular facility in my reference management software for magnificently buggering up my manuscripts. Is this because a future state in which I am calm and satisfied, having just submitted a perfectly referenced paper without inexplicable crashes, is somehow so disgusting that it interferes with the present to stop itself coming into being? Or is it just that I can’t for the life of me get the bloody program to work.
More philosophically, if the future is so powerful, why did it not intervene earlier in the process? I mean, if nobody had ever thought of the Higgs boson, we wouldn’t be building giant colliders to look for it, which makes me wonder if there are secrets that the future doesn’t want us to know.
Think about it; a sort of cosmological superinjunction stopping us from knowing what we don’t know. But in this case, I don’t think Twitter is going to be much help, even if Stephen Fry gets involved.
The Universe starts tweeting.
Now there’s a beautiful idea.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Richard P Grant and LabLit, Bill Town. Bill Town said: Bill dreams about particle physics and wakes up with a large hadron http://bit.ly/1ydKFU #lablit blogs (via @lablit) […]
Perhaps the Higgs is the lesser of two evils the Universe wants us to know about?
Naturally, <a href="http://twitter.com/AskTheUniverse"The Universe is already on Twitter.
This also looks like a great way of getting rid of incompetent students, on moral grounds. “His PCR simply didn’t work, whatever we tried. Clearly the universe is stopping it from working, because he will do something terrible if it did”.
that occurred to me too. We could never know what it is, because of the cosmological superinjunction. But… the mind boggles.
Maybe we could threaten the universe with something worse than a Higgs boson if it doesn’t cough one up. Maybe if there’s no luck after another year we encourage Paris Hilton to write a book of poetry. Or make her secretary general of the UN, or something.
I’m scared, let alone the universe.
I wonder, idly, if the proponents of this theory, in common with those who fear the LHC will generate an earth-devouring black-hole, are also considered by Professor Brian Cox to be ‘twats’?
Well, that’s Cox’s look-out. Sounds like an hypothesis that can be tested to me, and quantum physics is bloody weird.