"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."

I think the point of the article is right there in the first paragraph, although a bit obscure. Suppose the explosive shutdown was an experimental result, a data point, if you will.

It would seem to be expedient to investigate the shutdown as such. Maybe an invisible hand intervening from the future is crackpottery, but could we know for sure, if shutdowns continue to plague the project?

How do people not see this is ******ed physicist humor? It basically boils down to:

I mean, suuuuurre, that's possible, but no physicist would take it seriously.

These guys have apparently been putting stuff on arXiv on more or less this topic for 2 years, if I understand the internet correctly. That's an awful long time for them to be joking.

I can't pretend to understand a lot of the QM-literature, but I think I get what is being said here, and it'll be fun to see how this turns out. It's such a ridiculous and counter-intuitive theory but now that we all know about it, if CERN does continue to coincidentally fail then we're going to start coming around to this story. I like how it's difficult to conceive the theory without thinking of the Higgs Boson as some sentient agent out to conceal the secrets of the universe from us forever. What a bastard.

Under the way that is formulated, namely that the other branches have been weeded out of the possible worlds and we're one of the ones that survived, that would mean we are not going to see this out we're almost certainly going to be destroyed. Its like if we some how found out we had just won 500 games of russian roulette in a row played when we were sleeping and now we were going to play the next 500 with our eyes open. Unless you think we can jump between worlds some how.

But absent a theoretical reason to fear the Higgs I dont really see how the magnitude of these coincidences warrant this kind of speculation to begin with.

I thought that the Everett interpretation implied that we can jump between worlds. Or rather, we are a member of lots of worlds, some of which come to an end, but we never notice it. Aren't the authors suggesting that when the magnet broke, a huge chunk of worlds came to an end as they encountered the Higgs boson?

I hope no one was planning on reading Sirens of Titan, because the NY Times just ruined it for ya.

Even more strangeness holding up progress with the LHC...

http://www.popsci.com/science/articl...shuts-down-lhc

I am a Higgs particle.

Anyone else sign up in the future to be one?

When these coincidences continue to pile up over the next decade, at what point do we start to feel guilty about all the universes we've murdered?

I would love for this to escalate to the realm of the profoundly surreal.

I don't want to give the impression that I am taking that paper seriously, but if nature abhorred the Higgs so much, the easiest solution would be to never let the Higgs be a decay route for a collision. Everything is probabilistic so it could be that the Higgs simply is never produced as the result of any particle interaction. Of course this would be the exact same as the Higgs not existing and would cause theorists to go back and look for another way to break electro weak symmetry that fits in with all known data, rather than some crazy theory about the universe abhorring the higgs.

What's crazier, making up a particle so that it fits with the work, or making up an excuse about why the made up particle doesn't show up when the calculations say it should?

Somebody is leveling us all.

I have no idea what you mean. The LHC will almost certainly find the Higgs so it probably doesnt matter

Scientists have "made up" particles before and been correct. Look up the pion, W & Z bosons, the Charm quark and even the top quark. Oh, and then there's the lepton flavored neutrinos, can't forget those.


Scientists postulate the existence of particles all the time. I could name another 50 that are postulated. The problem is, the Higgs is not a periphery particle, but a very fundamental one that needs to be there for our whole current theory to work.

When we postulate it's existence, we get the most accurate theory in the history of the world. I'm not exaggerating. It has made the most accurate predictions of any theory.

So if it's wrong, it's a spectacular failure.

Theory #1: The instant we have a true "Theory of Everything" which we can use to predict anything and everything in the physical universe, the physical universe will change, and the theory will be disproved before it can be proven.

Theory #2: It's already happened an infinite number of times.


(I'm not saying this is true; I've just always liked the idea. )

That.

That's OK, it'll make physics exciting again.