My Favorite Story of the Year: Time-Travelers Use Super-Awesome Physics to Sabotage the Large Hadron Collider

I love literature; I’ve pretty much devoted my life to its creation and study; I’ve no regrets. And yet. Sometimes, when perusing the pages of the New York Times, it’s not the stories about writers and their cock-eyed theories that make my heart well with amazement and joy. (Take a look at this utterly homophobic and idiotic screencap of John Wright’s blog [note: it's an image, so you may need to enlarge it] for one example.) It’s the physicists. We have reached a point in time where physicists have replaced shamans and priests as interpreters of the cosmos — and that includes mythmaking.

To wit, and courtesy of the New York Times:

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.

Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, put this idea forward in a series of papers with titles like “Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal” and “Search for Future Influence From LHC,” posted on the physics Web site arXiv.org in the last year and a half.

That’s right: the single most clichéd and overexposed plot-type in science fiction, time-travel, is now being touted by one of the fathers of string theory as scientifically plausible. Mind you, plenty of fine scientists think Nielsen and Ninomiya are off their their collective rocker (this post, which I followed from the NYT’s article, throughly dismantles the idea). But what interests me is the fact that, as insane and unscientific as the theory sounds, and the solution — to draw cards to determine whether the future is influencing the past — even battier, is that top-level physicists are publishing these ideas to a respectable physics web site at all. That is, there is enough acceptance of these ideas, and enough “good” physics behind them, to actually publish (and then ridicule) them.

As funny and weird as this story is in this specific case, I would argue that it is a good sign for physics in general. It shows that, as a community, physicists are leveraging every last ounce of their brainpower to create ideas. Some — most — of those ideas will of course prove to be wrong, and, on the spectrum of wrong ideas, some will fall on the outlandish, ludicrous, utterly untenable end. But that is a necessary outcome, to my mind, of a thinking community doing serious work. If we never consider the outlandish, we will never discover just how outlandish existence really is. And, given the physics that we’ve already to be proven true and reliable — relativity much? — we know that our universe (multiverse, x-iverse, whatever) is positively gonzo.

I don’t think there’s any reason to take Nielsen and Ninomiya seriously, but, to be honest, I’m also not qualified to evaluate their ideas. A lot of really important physicists are saying there are ten dimensions, tiny, rolled-up dimensions, “branes” that may have been the cause of the Big Bang, and all sorts of other stuff that I can kind of understand in a layman’s way but have no capacity to verify using their math and science they are using. Like members of the tribe listening to their shamans, I have to take their word on faith.

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