Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Large Hadron Collider Update: October 14, 2009

For those that follow the blog especially close, I've provided occasional updates on the progress of the Large Hadron Collider. The best background post is here, other related posts are here, here, and here. The NYT gives an update, and notes that "[i]n December, if all goes well, protons will start smashing together in an underground racetrack outside Geneva..."

The lesson, as always: With government, months means years.

(By the way, that NYT article is interesting insofar that people have written papers describing how the Large Hadron Collider is being sabotaged from the future.

A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

Bizarre. The papers which put forth these theories are here and here.)

(Edited: Justin beat me to it!)

5 comments:

Admiral said...

As a Starfleet Admiral, I have some perspective on this. In Elementary Temporal Dynamics, you learn that grandfather paradoxes *exist*, but in practice it is almost impossible to realize.

Take the new Star Trek movie for example. This is very standard time travel. The red matter induced anomaly brought the Narada and Jellyfish into the 23rd century, but the second they entered, that universe split from the universe that created it in that no consequence would affect the "prime" universe iteration.

If I went back in time and killed my grandmother before my mother was born, then I still exist. Fundamental laws of thermodynamics still exist and none would operate to suddenly dissolve all your matter simply because of a particularly heinous murder.

Anonymous said...

Well Admiral, thermodynamics only ensures that time goes (as far as we perceive) forwards, it doesn't come in to causality, I mean, if I killed my grandmother, regardless of thermodynamics, if I was in the same timeline as her when I did it, there would be an unresolvable paradox. Causality and a linear series of events are the only things that can be broken to cause a paradox, but then we ignore Hume's idea that natural law, and by extension from that, a priori knowledge, are all subject to repetetive experience. But I definitley agree on the multi-dimensional theory, it makes a lot of sense that if I were to go and kill my Granny before I was born, I would have to have gone to an alternate dimension and killed an alternate Me's granny.

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this device is so dangerous, without a doubt maybe this is the mayor invention in all world, with this we can discover a lot of thing about our universe.

YouTube downloader said...

Large Hadron Collider is a huge tool of knowledge, I should say. At least once a year they discover something unbelievably important for learning how the whole world works. It's really exciting to read scientific news these days thanks to LHC.

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