The LHC and Bokurano

Apreche

There's a story going around about the LHC. As I understand it, the theory (or hypothesis) is that there may be a chance the LHC does destroy the universe. However, it would destroy the universe not just in space, but in time in both directions. The universe would just never exist. Thus, the fact that we are here now means that our universe is not destroyed in this fashion in the future, though other universes might be. Therefore, if the LHC would destroy the universe in this fashion, then from our point of view, it will just never work. Because our universe is one in which the LHC does not destroy the universe, our universe must be one in which the LHC simply never works. A probability wave from the future will keep coming back and preventing the LHC from working. If it continues to break, and break, and break, then this is an idea we will have to take more seriously. Of course, it also means we should never stop trying to make it work.

Think about the anime/manga Bokurano. If this physics thing is true, then it would have interesting implications in a Bokurano-like scenario. I mean, the whole show is about "reset the world". Approaching these kinds of apocalyptic stories from the perspective of this scientific idea is really fascinating. If you're going to enter a situation where universe destruction appears to be a consequence, you should have no fear whatsoever. The fact that you are still existing right now means that consequence doesn't come to be. Because if it happened in the future, you wouldn't be here in the present. Thus, there would be no reason to fear universe destruction as an option, although personal destruction is still something to be wary of.

This also makes me wonder about free will in my own life. Am I unable to do things now because they are already not done in the future?

WindUpBird

As I understand it, the theory (or hypothesis) is that there may be a chance the LHC does destroy the universe.

I could take this seriously if cosmic rays weren't producing Higgs events in our atmosphere constantly. Furthermore, the Tevatron at Fermilab has been searching for the Higgs boson since 1987, and so far it hasn't been ripped to shreds by mysterious events. If causality was really attempting to save us from our curiosity in quantum physics, wouldn't cosmic rays mysterious dodge Earth and the Tevatron have become embroiled in the same incidents back in the 80s?

Dr. Timo

I could take it seriously if I hadn't personally met Holger Beck Nielsen (the author of the paper in question) and listened to several of his talks. Let's just say that he also had (a few years back) an idea to test for the existence of God by randomly switching off and on the LHC...

PDF link to the article.

Edit: the God thing and this more recent work are actually connected. And although God was mentioned in his talks, it is absent from his papers, probably due to his collaborators who also several times use the phrase "one of the authors (H.B.N) thinks/has worked on/etc ..." which makes me wonder about the whole thing even more. Here is the earlier article about stopping the LHC randomly.

Victor Frost

Aaaand Here comes Timo telling us this guy is crazy. Thank you much.

Still, the whole reverse destruction idea is an interesting mind game.

Axel

The idea is certainly interesting, and definitely relevant to Bokurano.

Granted, the guy might be crazy, but I think with further testing his point could be proven. Or dis proven. All depends on what happens to the LHC next.

theTevatronat Fermilab has been searching for the Higgs boson since 1987, and so far it hasn't been ripped to shreds by mysterious events.

Maybe not, but maybe the Tevatron isn't able to find the Higgs boson. Maybe the LHC is the first machine that's capable, and that's why it's being stopped.

WindUpBird

Holger Beck Nielsen

Is that the author of The God Particle? Or is the book unrelated to physics-motivated deism?

Jay

Though I agree with Timo that it is incredibly unlikely the LHC could tear apart time, that is besides the point of the concept brought up in the thread. Questions like this,

Therefore, if the LHC would destroy the universe in this fashion, then from our point of view, it will just never work. Because our universe is one in which the LHC does not destroy the universe, our universe must be one in which the LHC simply never works. A probability wave from the future will keep coming back and preventing the LHC from working. If it continues to break, and break, and break,

...

This also makes me wonder about free will in my own life. Am I unable to do things now because they are already not done in the future?

always made me uncomfortable. Learning that time is an actual thing, and not just a human construct to organize ourselves as the sun goes around our planet, was probably the first time in my life that my mind was literally "blown".

Now, is there any evidence that time can propagate backwards? That information can be sent backwards, that the future can affect the past? I would assume a simple solution to this problem is that the future can not affect the past. Both do not exist at the same instant. We exist in time but its more of a constant wave moving forward then a continuous string that holds all records of past and future. This is my present mental visualization of time. If time is actually closer to the string analogy my mind will be blown once again.

Dr. Timo

Holger Beck Nielsen

Is that the author of The God Particle? Or is the book unrelated to physics-motivated deism?

Nope. Also I should clarify that with HBN you really don't know how much of his stuff is tongue in cheek, I mean he is an actual bona fide physicist.

Philosophy (and to a lesser extent religion) are work related hazards for theoretical physicists and they happen to the best of us.

WindUpBird

Ignore this. Vanilla is going nuts.

WindUpBird

Now, is there any evidence that time can propagate backwards? That information can be sent backwards, that the future can affect the past? I would assume a simple solution to this problem is that the future can not affect the past. Both do not exist at the same instant. We exist in time but its more of a constant wave moving forward then a continuous string that holds all records of past and future. This is my present mental visualization of time. If time is actually closer to the string analogy my mind will be blown once again.

Someone needs to read about light cones, Feynmann diagrams, and retrocausality. Your entire view of what you thought constituted your reality is going to crumble.

Jay

Now, is there any evidence that time can propagate backwards? That information can be sent backwards, that the future can affect the past? I would assume a simple solution to this problem is that the future can not affect the past. Both do not exist at the same instant. We exist in time but its more of a constant wave moving forward then a continuous string that holds all records of past and future. This is my present mental visualization of time. If time is actually closer to the string analogy my mind will be blown once again.

Someone needs to read about light cones, Feynmann diagrams, and retrocausality. Your entire view of what you thought constituted your reality is going to crumble.

Retro causality I know about, but to my understanding it is hypothesis with some math behind it. Math is good, it shows its not pure crazy talk, but not exactly grounds to rock my world either. Allot of things have math behind them, allot of things end up being wrong. To quote good old wiki "While a few legitimate scientific theories have also proposed limited forms of retrocausality, no experimental observations have been reliably reported that verify such hypotheses."

Now I have lightly skimmed over both light cones and Feynmann diagrams but I defiantly need too dedicate some time to this before I understand either. If you would be so kind as to perhaps add a few key words to help my searches so my crumbling of the universe could be accelerated? I do enjoy a good crumbling. Everything would be so boring if I was right about everything. (I would also be allot more rich)

edit* If the future and past existed at the same time wouldn't there be allot of energy being produced for free? I would assume Thermodynamics would have a problem with this. Though this may be a question that comes down to 11 dimensional math and cant be understood with simple analogies. If that's the case I'll just have to take it on the word of those theoretical physicists that are smarter then myself.

WindUpBird

If you would be so kind as to perhaps add a few key words to help my searches so my crumbling of the universe could be accelerated? I do enjoy a good crumbling.

I can't claim to understand all of them. Timo would probably be better at it. However, from what I understand, when you apply light cones (which represent all possible causalities past, present, and future from the observer's frame of reference) to relativistic space-time (wherein space-time is curved, unlike the planar nature of the Minkowski diagrams), all those causalities start to interact, because making such cones parallel across all time becomes impossible. So, if I'm interpreting it correctly, what this starts to mean is that there is a way to geometrically show that every action there ever was and ever will be, and every corresponding event therein, are locked together by these lightcones forming a sort of causal crosshatching across all space and time. It's like what Douglas Adams wrote in HGttG: "There is no problem about changing the course of history - the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end."

Hence, retrocausality. Would we ever be able to prove it? Probably not, because what will need to have occurred to retrocause an event, if you will, will have already occurred. Forever.

Thaed

Clarke tells us: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Yet, I don't think the LHC is magic. It's pretty advanced and it is going to do some nifty high energy physics experiments but all this talk about world ending stuff seems to border on mysticism and hubris. My prediction is that while the LHC may clear the air a bit in the world of theoretical physics it will quickly just be regarded as another tool in the physics tool box. Its place in history will rival that of the Hubble telescope but it won't change the immediate course of humanity. It may lay ground work for advanced technology made possible in 50 or 100 years but don't hold your breath.

WindUpBird

On my earlier post: It should probably be noted that the direction and causal events included in ones light cone likely shift as the observer "selects" (that is, acts on) a given causality, which means nothing is entirely predetermined, only the possibility of an occurrence is. If I understand it correctly.

Andrew

Obviously people from the future are traveling back in time to sabotage the LHC to prevent it from becoming fully operational.

WindUpBird

Obviously people from the future are traveling back in time to sabotage the LHC to prevent it from becoming fully operational.

Nah, we've just accidentally created a retrocausality bubble around CERN, which is keeping the universe stable by destroying that which threatens its mechanics. Eventually, said bubble will collapse, the LHC will become the Monolith Room from Stalker, CERN will become the Zone, and retrocausality will be proven as we see that Andrei Tarkovski was really making a documentary about events that already will have occurred.

Aside: attempting to properly conjugate verbs in the context of altered causality is so much fun.

Starfox

there is a way to geometrically show that every action there ever was and ever will be, and every corresponding event therein, are locked together by these lightcones forming a sort of causal crosshatching across all space and time.

What about the metric expansion of space? Taking that into account, it is possible for me to define two light cones that will never intersect (given an infinite universe).

WindUpBird

there is a way to geometrically show that every action there ever was and ever will be, and every corresponding event therein, are locked together by these lightcones forming a sort of causal crosshatching across all space and time.

What about the metric expansion of space? Taking that into account, it is possible for me to define two light cones that will never intersect (given an infinite universe).

I should amend what I said earlier. You can define two light cones that will never intersect, but you cannot make it so that all light cones are simultaneously parallel. So maybe not all causalities are linked, but a great many likely overlap (even very, very minutely).

You'll pardon me for playing Wikiphysicist again. I'm okay at interpreting all of this to a point, but I'm apt to overlook stuff (the expansion of space being a glaring error). I should probably bring my various physics books back with me to college next time I go home; I have a feeling Hawking is a better teacher of this information than Wikipedia.

Apreche

I should amend what I said earlier. You can define two light cones that will never intersect, but you cannot make it so that all light cones are simultaneously parallel. So maybe not all causalities are linked, but a great many likely overlap (even very, very minutely).

Uh, what if there's only one light cone?

WindUpBird

I should amend what I said earlier. You can define two light cones that will never intersect, but you cannot make it so that all light cones are simultaneously parallel. So maybe not all causalities are linked, but a great many likely overlap (even very, very minutely).

Uh, what if there's only one light cone?

I didn't consider that, but in relativity a light cone is just defined as the cone of causal future converging at a point with the cone of causal past of said point, where the point is an observer, an object, whatever. I suppose you could have a single light cone in if only one point was defined, but that would be purely theoretical. However, in Minkowski space you can have as many or as few cones as you like and have them all be parallel, because the Minkowski surface is planar (per my understanding).

I spent all day discussing orbital hybridization and relativistic mass, and now I'm "relaxing" by discussing the theoretical nature of light cones in a plane. Funny that.

Churba

Uh, what if there's only one light cone?

Then one of your headlights is out.

WindUpBird

Uh, what if there's only one light cone?

Then one of your headlights is out.

What if I'm riding a motorcycle?

Churba

What if I'm riding a motorcycle?

Then you're awesome.

Starfox

You'll pardon me for playing Wikiphysicist again. I'm okay at interpreting all of this to a point, but I'm apt to overlook stuff (the expansion of space being a glaring error).

It's cool. I do this a lot too. It's like peer review!

Dr. Timo

If you have an hour to spare, here is a lecture on time, it's origin and nature, given at the Perimeter Institute. Talk starts 4 minutes in.