Higgs boson could ripple back through time and prevent the Hadron Collider being built

More than a year after an explosion of sparks, soot and frigid helium shut it down, the world’s biggest and most expensive physics experiment, known as the Large Hadron Collider, is poised to start up again. In December, if all goes well, protons will start smashing together in an underground racetrack outside Geneva in a search for forces and particles that reigned during the first trillionth of a second of the Big Bang.

Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No, I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own 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.

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.

According to the so-called Standard Model that rules almost all physics, the Higgs is responsible for imbuing other elementary particles with mass.

“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail message. In an unpublished essay, Dr. Nielson said of the theory, “Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.” It is their guess, he went on, “that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”

This malign influence from the future, they argue, could explain why the United States Superconducting Supercollider, also designed to find the Higgs, was canceled in 1993 after billions of dollars had already been spent, an event so unlikely that Dr. Nielsen calls it an “anti-miracle.”

You might think that the appearance of this theory is further proof that people have had ample time — perhaps too much time — to think about what will come out of the collider, which has been 15 years and $9 billion in the making.

The collider was built by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, to accelerate protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts around an 18-mile underground racetrack and then crash them together into primordial fireballs.

For the record, as of the middle of September, CERN engineers hope to begin to collide protons at the so-called injection energy of 450 billion electron volts in December and then ramp up the energy until the protons have 3.5 trillion electron volts of energy apiece and then, after a short Christmas break, real physics can begin.

Maybe.

Dr. Nielsen and Dr. Ninomiya started laying out their case for doom in the spring of 2008. It was later that fall, of course, after the CERN collider was turned on, that a connection between two magnets vaporized, shutting down the collider for more than a year.

Dr. Nielsen called that “a funny thing that could make us to believe in the theory of ours.”

He agreed that skepticism would be in order. After all, most big science projects, including the Hubble Space Telescope, have gone through a period of seeming jinxed. At CERN, the beat goes on: Last weekend the French police arrested a particle physicist who works on one of the collider experiments, on suspicion of conspiracy with a North African wing of Al Qaeda.

Dr. Nielsen and Dr. Ninomiya have proposed a kind of test: that CERN engage in a game of chance, a “card-drawing” exercise using perhaps a random-number generator, in order to discern bad luck from the future. If the outcome was sufficiently unlikely, say drawing the one spade in a deck with 100 million hearts, the machine would either not run at all, or only at low energies unlikely to find the Higgs.

Sure, it’s crazy, and CERN should not and is not about to mortgage its investment to a coin toss. 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.” …

We always assume that the past influences the future. But that is not necessarily true in the physics of Newton or Einstein. According to physicists, all you really need to know, mathematically, to describe what happens to an apple or the 100 billion galaxies of the universe over all time are the laws that describe how things change and a statement of where things start. The latter are the so-called boundary conditions — the apple five feet over your head, or the Big Bang.

The equations work just as well, Dr. Nielsen and others point out, if the boundary conditions specify a condition in the future (the apple on your head) instead of in the past, as long as the fundamental laws of physics are reversible, which most physicists believe they are.

“For those of us who believe in physics,” Einstein once wrote to a friend, “this separation between past, present and future is only an illusion.”

via Essay – The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate – NYTimes.com.

Researchers Say Photo of Jim Morrison’s Ghost Is Real

Jim Morrison has been dead for almost four decades but a snapshot belonging to longtime rock historian Brett Meisner allegedly shows the Doors frontman haunting his own grave. And now, just in time for Halloween, researchers now claim the image is authentic.

Back in 1997, Meisner decided to take a snapshot next to the rock legend’s grave in the famous Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, not exactly an uncommon thing to do considering some 1000 people visit the grave daily. The photo, taken by Meisner’s assistant, shows the historian casually standing next to Morrison’s plot with one hand in his pocket and a white cloudy shadow to his left, the latter going unnoticed until Meisner finally decided to revisit the photo in 2002. The cloudy obscure image to Meisner’s left appeared to be the deceased singer himself.

Word quickly spread thanks to the Internet and the historian sent the photo in for further analysis, which concluded that the snapshot was indeed as bone chilling as it was first perceived. In a new book titled ‘Ghosts Caught on Film 2: Photographs of the Unexplained,’ researchers rule out both lightning and image manipulation and conclude that the photo is simply “unexplainable.”

“Part of me wishes that I never stepped foot into the graveyard in the first place,” Meisner told the UK’s Sunday Express. His life was never the same after taking it. Not only did his marriage dissolve, but in an eerie coincidence to Morrison’s life, Meisner lost a close pal to a drug overdose as well. The photo also brought all sorts of characters to Meisner’s door, claiming they bore messages from the rock god.

“At first it was sort of interesting to see how many people felt a spiritual bond with Jim and the photo,” Meisner said, “but now the whole vibe seems negative.” Meisner hopes to privately donate the photo and negative.

via Researchers Say Photo of Jim Morrison’s Ghost Is Real – Spinner.

Comment:

Simple Optical Illusion. On a laptop screen move to side to side and you can tell its just the brick colors making up his left arm or the one on the right as we see it. unless his arm has three segments. The shadow from the doorway which is recessed moves in at an angle because of the cameras position. And the shadow that is his face runs into the rest of the doorway. And if you look closely his right leg does not line up with his body on his right side. the way the shadowing is makes it appear to have black pants on. And look at his midsection unless he has put on some weight around the hips. the white shirt effect is the sunlight shining it the recessed doorway at that time of day. It would be easy to reproduce the same effect with the f stop macking the background a little fuzzy

Cat registered as hypnotherapist

The regulation of hypnotherapists in the UK is so lax that even a cat can become accredited, the BBC has found.

Chris Jackson, presenter of Inside Out in the North East and Cumbria, registered pet George with three industry bodies.

Each one accepted a certificate from the non-existent Society of Certified Advanced Mind Therapists as proof of George’s credentials.

It follows a similar investigation by an American clinical psychologist.

Dr Steve Eichel suspected industry bodies in the US were not running checks on their members.

He said: “I felt I’d test my hypothesis and I did that by getting my cat certified by a number of the most prominent lay hypnosis organisations in the United States. It was a frighteningly simple process.”

In the UK, George was registered with the British Board of Neuro Linguistic Programming (BBNLP), the United Fellowship of Hypnotherapists (UFH) and the Professional Hypnotherapy Practitioner Association (PHPA).

The UFH welcomed the Inside Out investigation and admitted the mistake, which it said has since been corrected.

A PHPA spokesman said the organisation makes great effort to ensure every applicant is a fully-qualified hypnotherapist.

The BBNLP said it exists only to provide benefits to its members, not to check or certify credentials.

via BBC NEWS | UK | England | Cat registered as hypnotherapist.

That cat hypnotized me. Twice. Don’t look at it! Ah, too late. That’s three times.

Rare Vegetarian Spider Discovered

In a possible affront to its fierce meat-eating relatives, one jumping spider prefers to dine vegetarian, munching on specialized leaf-tips of acacia shrubs, finds a new study.

The eight-legged vegetarian, called Bagheera kiplingi, lives in Central America, and is now considered a rarity among the world’s 40,000 or so spider species, most of which are strictly predators, feeding on insects and other animals. B. kiplingi is about the size of a person’s pinky nail.

“This is really the first spider known to specifically ‘hunt’ plants; it is also the first known to go after plants as a primary food source,” said study researcher Christopher Meehan of Villanova University in Pennsylvania. (Co-author Eric Olson of Brandeis University independently observed the same behaviors in another population of this spider in Costa Rica.)

Essentially, the spider employs hunting strategies to get past guard ants that keep the acacias safe from other herbivores. In return, the ants get a comfy place to live — the plant’s hollow spines — and food in the form of acacia nectar and the shrub’s leaf-tips.

B. kiplingi spends its entire life on the acacia shrubs, and so must avoid the ants at all times. When hunting, they actively avoid the ants by changing targets when approached by a guard, and using silk droplines as retreat ladders. The spiders also nest primarily on the ends of older acacia leaves, spots the researchers found were least patrolled by ants.

“Most of the big spider textbooks almost outright claimed there are no herbivorous spiders,” Meehan told LiveScience. “It’s on par with the flying pig in terms of novelty.”…

via Rare Vegetarian Spider Discovered | LiveScience.

I need to laugh more

I’ve started a pursuit of happiness program this week.

1. Take a full hour and write down everything you want. Anything that comes to mind. Brainstorm.
2. Then prioritize. Sort your goals until you have, in order of importance, what you want from life.
3. Translate your goals into actions: I want ____ and so I do _____. Each goal could have many actions. Some actions can help you meet several goals.

Then jump in! Make things happen.  Use all of your resources. Don’t hold back.  Don’t get out of balance. If you want to be in shape, exercise!  If you want love, make it. If you want to be happy, _(fill in the blank)____.

This how I figured out that I need to laugh more.  Birds don’t care if I laugh or not.