The LHC must close for up to a year at the end of 2011, says an LHC director. Story here.
Although as this is an announcement of a future shut-down, it can only be the hand of the anthropic principle in the cases where the reader of this comment is in an ancestor simulation from after the shut-down.
If this sort of thing started to happen, it would give the people with the LHC the power to, for example, decide close elections, right?
I hate religion and everything it stands for as much as anybody, but that jab just felt awkward and out of place.
Well, yes. Real-life religion tends to be a lot more weird and a lot more nasty at the same time.
Here are the four papers relating to influence from the future and the LHC:
http://arxiv.org/find/physics/1/au:+Ninomiya_M/0/1/0/all/0/1
The basic idea is that these physicists have a theory that the Higgs particle would be highly unusual, such that its presence in a branch of the multiverse would greatly decrease the measure of that branch. Now I don't claim to understand their math, but it seems that this might produce a different result than the usual anthropic-type arguments regarding earth-destroying experiments.
The authors refer to an "influence f...
Whether the LHC discovers the Higgs or not, it has already provided billions of dollars worth of comic value. The NY Times article, which I'm sure Eliezer was referring to, is worth its weight in gold.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/science/space/13lhc.html?_r=3&pagewanted=all
A broadsheet is about 29x23 inches (the full spread). The paper density for newsprint appears to be around 45 grams per square meter. This gives us 0.430 m^2, or 19.35 grams. At gold prices of 38.62 USD per gram, we get 747.3 USD. Not too shabby - I'd like to be paid in gold weight per article written :-)
Notes:
It seems 'worth its weight in gold' also explains why the articles are available free at nytimes.com.
We should start a pool on what the cause of the next delay will be. My money is on insect infestation or the arrest of important researchers/engineers.
Update: They're shutting down the Tevatron particle accelerator on Friday. The funding ran out.
Fermilab "is now likely to shift its emphasis to projects that - for example - rely on particles at high intensities, rather than high energies."
In other physics news, experimenters confirmed the results of a controversial experiment during which the collapse postulate killed a God-damned puppy. Early indications suggest it has an appetite for poor lost photogenic puppies and kittens, specifically those that would never have been seen again if they hadn't been gobbled up. In response, Prof. von Shnicker spittle-spattered, "THIS PROVES NOTHING! VE VILL DISPROVE THE MANY-WORLDS IN OUR LIFETIMES!"
Apparently they assume no Higgs bosons from the high energy cosmic rays, anymore. Why?
Is the situation inside the working LHC an entirely new ballgame?
Is there nothing like Higgs boson at all, as we see no Tutu hamster in the sky?
Or it will be quite a dull party at CERN, when something nonremarkable (like Higgs boson) will maybe be discovered?
As a young man I was at some of the lectures Holger Bech Nielsen gave at that time (I'm Danish). He is a very special person, but extremely smart. I would urge everyone to see him on youtube, you will see what I mean. You do not need to master the Danish language to catch a glimpse of his somewhat eccentric nature. But do not cheat you self, he is brilliant!!. And as usual the press has distorted what he said and taken it out of context and ignored the underlying humor that was in his "unpublished essay" Nice to The NYT try to be somewhat fair! But see for you self
But did they install the anti-ice skating mongoose field (and a cookie to anyone who gets the reference without using a search engine)?
Even assuming the anthropic black-hole explanation, wouldn't we be able to run a collider off-planet somewhere? And once humans had reliably settled outside Earth and were self-sufficient there, we could run one on Earth as well.
Actually if such we believe such a theory, it affords us a sort of ensoul-ness or Buddha-nature test. Does our latest A.I. creation have a soul/consciousness/cosmic transcendental thingy? We'll put it on the Moon to observe and run the collider down here, and if we finally succeed this time (and destroy the Earth), the AI was considered worthy by the Anthropic Principle of carrying on our legacy.
Edit: we'd have to rename it though. The All-Conscious Principle?
Actually if such we believe such a theory, it affords us a sort of ensoul-ness or Buddha-nature test. Does our latest A.I. creation have a soul/consciousness/cosmic transcendental thingy? We'll put it on the Moon to observe and run the collider down here, and if we finally succeed this time (and destroy the Earth), the AI was considered worthy by the Anthropic Principle of carrying on our legacy.
That's not how it works; the principle is that I will always observe that I survive.
The Large Hadron Collider was shut down yesterday by a hamster in a tutu, weary scientists announced.
The Large Hadron Collider is the successor to the earlier Superconducting Super Collider, which was shut down by the US House of Representatives in 1993 after 14 miles of tunnel had been constructed at a cost of $2 billion. Since its inception, the Large Hadron Collider has been plagued by construction delays, dead technicians, broken magnet supports, electrical faults, helium containment failures, vacuum leaks, birds with baguettes, terrorists, ninjas, pirates, supervillains, hurricanes, asteroids, cosmic energy storms, and a runaway train. On one occasion it was discovered that the entire 17-mile circular tunnel had been built upside-down due to a sign error in the calculations, and the whole facility had to be carefully flipped by a giant spatula.
One year ago, hopes were raised for the first time in decades when it was discovered that all the incidents up until that point had been the work of a sinister globe-spanning conspiracy of religious fanatics who, inspired by the term "God Particle", had decided that no one could ever be allowed to look upon the hypothetical Higgs boson. This discovery was widely considered to have undermined the theory that Nature abhors a sufficiently powerful particle collider. Though some found it suspicious that the Higgs boson would even have a religious cult devoted to preventing its observation, the affair did have a patina of surface plausibility - after all, a giant plot to prevent physicists from observing the Higgs boson makes around as much sense as anything else religious people do.
After the conspiracy was shut down by heroic international detectives in an operation so hugely dramatic that it would be pointless to summarize it here, the world began to wonder whether the LHC might really, really work this time around. Scientists everywhere held their breaths as the bodies were cleared out, the tunnels reconditioned, and the broken magnets replaced, all without incident. The price of large hadrons held steady on the commodities market, permitting the LHC's reservoirs to be fully stocked. Proton beams were successfully formed and circulated through the giant tunnel.
Moments before the first collision was scheduled to probe the theretofore-unachieved energy of 3.5 TeV, a hamster in a tutu materialized from nowhere at the intended collision point. The poor creature didn't even have time for a terrified squeak before the two proton beams smashed into it, releasing the equivalent energy of 724 megajoules or 173 kilograms of TNT.
The dispirited scientists of the LHC have announced that this will create a 24-month delay while tiny bits of hamster are cleaned out of the tunnels and anti-hamster-materialization fields are installed in the collider.
At the poorly attended press conference, journalists asked whether it might finally be time to give up.
"Nature's just messing with you, man," said a reporter from the New York Times. "You need to admit this isn't going to work out."
Professor Nicholas von Shnicker, project leader of the LHC, responded.
"NEVER!" shrieked von Shnicker, spittle flying from his lips and spattering on his ragged beard. "Ve vill NEVER give up! My father spent his life trying to make the LHC vork, and his father! Even if it takes a century, if it takes a thousand years or ten thousand million years, VE VILL SEE THE HIGGS BOSON IN OUR LIFETIMES!"
Prof. Kill McBibben is the author of the recently released book Enough, which proposes a new theory of the mysterious Counter-Force that prevents the LHC from operating. "It's not the Higgs boson going back in time," says Prof. McBibben, "nor is it the anthropic principle preventing a black hole from forming. We've just hit the point that we all knew was coming - that we all knew had to happen someday. We've reached the limits of human science. We are just not allowed to build colliders at higher than a certain energy, or know more than a certain amount of particle physics. This is the end of the road. We're done."