On Monday the New York Times ran an essay by Dennis Overbye on the world’s biggest and most expensive experiment in physics, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the notion that it is being sabotaged by its own future.
With the LHC, Physicists hope to produce the Higgs boson, a scalar elementary particle thought to be one of the fundamental building blocks of the universe. Things keep going wrong with the LHC though. After its last mishap, on September 19th, 2008, the Collider has been in repair ever since.
Overbye brings to the fore theories by two physicists, Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan. Described by Overbye as two “otherwise distinguished physicists”, Nielsen and Ninomiya are kicking around the idea of the Higgs boson being “so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one.” Heavy!
Nielsen is my favourite of the two. He posits that God “rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.” Now I know there are God fearing physicists out there, I’ve seen a couple pray even. Having a physicist include God in the way that Nielsen did though – placing all of his colleagues in a holy little playpen – was downright . . . divine!
As benighted as it sounds, I take comfort in that playpen. We’re at an age when anything seems possible and our undoing more likely than enlightenment. I don’t know if I’d ask for brakes, but boundaries…are appreciated, dear Lord. And, yes, there is a part of me that cringes at the fact that I’d have that thought. Yet another part had it, and won out enough for me to write the thing down.
As for the wackiness in Nielsen and Ninomiya’s theories, my favourite bit from Overbye follows below:
Sure, it’s crazy… The theory was greeted on some blogs with comparisons to Harry Potter. But craziness has a fine history in a physics that talks routinely about cats being dead and alive at the same time and about anti-gravity puffing out the universe.
As Niels Bohr, Dr. Nielsen’s late countryman and one of the founders of quantum theory, once told a colleague: “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”
I think an academic discussing the very foundations of our universe has to be a little out of it. It of course being the cradle with conventions and rules you’ve accepted but not yet explained. True, I’d rather see some of that creativity in our economics, at present. But before this sucker blows, let’s see how far these physicists, scientists and theorists get us. Maybe they’ll reach higher than Babel. OK, yeah…that’s the other part talking.
Read the rest of Overbye’s essay here.
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It happened again. This time the LHC overheated due to a piece of bread a bird dropped outside its lab. Come on!
Read all about it!