Accidental Blogger

The New York Times has an article about someone who thinks the higgs boson is traveling back in time to stop the Large Hadron Collider (where I do my research) from working. As evidence, we are reminded of project delays, the fact that the Superconducting Super Collider project was canceled in the nineties, and that time travel isn’t strictly impossible. We can confirm the hypothesis by drawing cards from a large deck to see if unlikely combinations arise.
Read the article, but only to marvel at the burning stupid it summarizes (the paper itself is here). It’s just a dreadful paper, and you don’t even need much physics to know so. In fact, time travel is hardly the biggest problem here:

• Not the slightest reason is given for why a higgs might want to not be made
• There’s no explanation for why it would work its magic by playing puckish trickster pranks on physicists and engineers.
• In fact, there’s no consideration at all given to *HOW* a particle would happen to tweak the brains and bodies of tens of thousands of people (including members of congress when they canceled the SSC) in just such ways as would preserve the ordinary operations of thought. You must have people thinking and acting in utterly prosaic ways as they decide whether and how to build accelerators (should this connection between two parts must be made of two-centimeter thick copper or one? Maybe construction on that sub-project ought to be shelved to speed up turn-on…) while all the time they’re being tweaked to achieve something distinctly un-ordinary – the failure of a large-scale multi billion dollar project. This sounds like the adaptive, reasoning, intelligent operation of an Evil Agent, not the steady, simple, lawful action of a particle obeying fundamental laws. What do the authors imagine the tee-shirt equation-of-motion for an adaptive saboteur looks like? Perhaps as a toy model they can present it evolving forward in time, if backwards seems too hard.
• The so-called argument from reverse-causation would apply to anything that has ever faced difficulties. Maybe the universe also hates the big dig or the Kyoto Protocol and tries its damndest to keep them from working.
• The probabilistic reasoning is fatuous – how are we to tell “Ooh, we picked a rare card! The higgs really wants not to be discovered!” from “Man, this card is rare. We must paint Botswana purple at once!” from “Such a splendiferous card! Surely the saints are telling us Roman Polanski is innocent and that the Riemann Hypothesis is false”? In the paper, this magic is accomplished by writing text on the cards. The authors haven’t seen fit to inform us whether words in any language reach the holy ears of the higgs, or if it likes only English. I imagine we are to be direct and straightforward in all our questions – it’s a spin-free boson, get it?

The physics itself doesn’t help one whit – there’s no more than a smidge of formalism about frameworks where you can have backward propagation in time. At least real papers on the subject treat the attendant issues in depth and seriously. Here it’s three or four essentially content free word-equations. The funny thing is there are much saner (and ubiquitous) ways of writing theories where the universe (or a part thereof) has a way of getting what it “wants” – you write an equation with a potential function, and regions of high potential are disfavored. So, the universe “wants” to keep us from escaping the surly bonds of earth by using gravity, if you want to put it that way.

The paper essentially serves as proof, if it was ever needed, that even people embedded in large scientific research communities may temporarily believe astonishingly foolish things when they’re deprived of the means for keeping them sane, busy and active: data, if possible data that don’t agree with what you already know.