Starship Asterisk*

makc wrote:This theory comes from comments to recent bird conspiracy thread on slashdot:

Lord Bitman wrote:this theory has actually been proposed: That activating the LHC would actually destroy the universe, that is, the whole universe, even reaching back into the past. That would mean that the only possible universes are ones in which the LHC is never activated, which means that if we keep trying, implausible events will continue to occur, preventing the LHC from activating- after all, we're here now, right. That's _proof_ that the LHC will never be activated!

makc wrote:

makc wrote:This theory comes from comments to recent bird conspiracy thread on slashdot:

Lord Bitman wrote:this theory has actually been proposed: That activating the LHC would actually destroy the universe, that is, the whole universe, even reaching back into the past. That would mean that the only possible universes are ones in which the LHC is never activated, which means that if we keep trying, implausible events will continue to occur, preventing the LHC from activating- after all, we're here now, right. That's _proof_ that the LHC will never be activated!

I guess this theory can now be dismissed due to inconsistency with experimental data. Because that's how science work, baby!

apodman wrote:Pardon a serious question, but what are we going to do with a Higgs boson when we get one?

I suppose we will first detect one without actually capturing it to poke and prod.

rstevenson wrote:It's Groundhog Day?!?

Does that mean this is As Good As It Gets?

Rob
(I think, after months of reading neufer's posts, that I'm finally getting into the spirit of irrelevantly relevent references. Now if only I could figure out how to write URLs so they are invisibly attached to the link text. Anyone care to enlighten me?)

It's [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundhog_Day_%28film%29]Groundhog Day[/url]?!?

Does that mean this is [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_Good_As_It_Gets]As Good As It Gets[/url]?

astrolabe wrote:Hello orin,

That's an easy one- the Garden of Eden.

bystander wrote:If you could go back in time and change the past, it would have already happened.

mark swain wrote:

bystander wrote:If you could go back in time and change the past, it would have already happened.

The question for me, would be, Which point in time would you like to go to. And Why.

orin stepanek wrote:I'd go back to the 1950's; they were great! 8) I wouldn't change anything.

astrolabe wrote:Hello orin,

Yeah, but I'll bet Eve was a HOTTIE! However I don't believe I could have persuaded her not to eat the apple. which goes with my thinking that the past cannot be changed in order to change the future. Future events are built on past ones. Therefore any changes by someone from the future are fated to be an actual part of an already receded past and results in nothing more than validating existing future events to be exactly as they are- unchangeable..

The real value of time travel would be knowledge gained WRT filling in blanks in natural, geological and human history. And even that would already part of the future's history so, again nothing changes.

rstevenson wrote:

orin stepanek wrote:I'd go back to the 1950's; they were great! 8) I wouldn't change anything.

Ah yes, the 50s... Bowls of cigarettes put out by the hostess at parties. Cars without seat belts. Polio. Yep, nothing there worth changing.

I'd go forward and take my chances rather than go anytime into the past.

Rob

BMAONE23 wrote:I think that if the past is accessable, it is unalterable (you might be able to prevent Kennedy from being shot but he would die anyway) and the future is fluidic, constantly changing as dictated by everyones actions.

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/Large-Hadron-Collider-Shatters-Energy-Record-68767.html?wlc=1259614179 wrote:
Large Hadron Collider Shatters Energy Record
By Richard Adhikari
TechNewsWorld 11/30/09 11:57 AM PT

<<The Large Hadron Collider created by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, officially became the world's highest-energy particle accelerator on Monday.

The enormous facility has sent two beams of protons shooting through its ring at 1.18 teraelectronvolts (TeV). It happened 10 days after scientists started up the collider again following a one-year hiatus due to technical problems.

The previous record of 0.98 TeV was set by the U.S. Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory's Tevatron collider in 2001.

The LHC is designed to smash proton beams into one another at 7 TeV to help simulate the sort of conditions present just after the Big Bang. In doing this, scientists hope to answer some of the most fundamental questions in physics. These include proving whether or not the Higgs boson exists.

Built in a circular tunnel 27 km in circumference and buried about 50 to 75 meters underground, the LHC is designed to bash together two beams of protons or heavy ions moving at 99.999999 percent of the speed of light. The beams rotate in opposite directions.

That cosmic train wreck will let scientists get a peek at what happened microseconds after the Big Bang theoretically created the universe. How does it do this? High-energy particle accelerators can, in effect, act as microscopes that examine fundamental physics at distances a hundredth or a thousandth of the size of a proton, according to Penn State University physics professor John Collins.

One of the questions the LHC was built to answer is, does the Higgs boson really exist? A boson is a subatomic particle that obeys Bose-Einstein statistics. Scientists have observed bosons, and, using the Standard Model, have predicted that the Higgs boson exists, but they have not yet observed one.

The Standard Model of particle physics is a theory of three of the four known physical fundamental interactions and the elementary particles taking part in these interactions. These particles make up all visible matter in the universe. The Standard Model falls short of being a complete theory of fundamental interactions because it does not include gravitation, dark matter, or dark energy.

A Higgs boson, if it exists, would explain the origin of mass in the universe. "An elaboration of the Standard Model of particle physics suggests there's another force in the universe which confers mass upon all basic particles," explained Phillip Schewe, a spokesperson for the American Institute of Physics. "A very basic question that hasn't yet been answered is, why do quarks and other known particles have the properties they do, such as mass and specific charges?"

Why is a Higgs boson different from other bosons? This boson is really a precipitation of the Higgs field, which permeates the universe, Schewe told TechNewsWorld. "Just as moisture in the air could precipitate as a raindrop, so can the Higgs field precipitate as a particle," he explained. That particle would be the Higgs boson.

While the Higgs boson has mass, it is very unstable as a particle, so it cannot easily be observed in a laboratory, Schewe said. It has to be artificially created in order to be observed and, even then, it will exist for a very short time. To create Higgs bosons, the LHC needs to smash together particle beams at pretty close to the speed of light. "You need lots of energy for this because these particles are so heavy," Schewe explained.

When the beams are smashed together, the resulting energy is converted into a very small fireball that manifests briefly as a particle which decays rapidly into a daughter particle. The daughter particle has a longer life, but it's still very short. "It may be the fourth- or fifth-generation daughter particle that is stable enough to observe," Schewe said.

If everything goes according to researchers' plans, the LHC will smash proton beams together for the rest of the year to calibrate its equipment. The first proper physics results are expected to emerge in the first quarter of next year.>>

Chris Peterson wrote:

BMAONE23 wrote:I think that if the past is accessable, it is unalterable (you might be able to prevent Kennedy from being shot but he would die anyway) and the future is fluidic, constantly changing as dictated by everyones actions.

Your example is a bad one. If you stop Kennedy from being shot, you've changed the past regardless of whether he dies or not. The repercussions of his dying differently would spread into the future. It would be a different future.

Chris Peterson wrote:I can't imagine any mechanism that would allow interaction with the past that wouldn't also change it.

Orca wrote:The trick is, the time traveler's personal history is contained in that future!

BMAONE23 wrote:Go back in time and leave yourself a message to buy Microsoft stock during its IPO and hold it until a certain date, the day after you've traveled back to the past (You must bring the investment money with you though so you don't affect your spending habits). Then you will not have altered your past until you've returned to your present timeline.