quote:

Man arrested at Large Hadron Collider claims he's from the future

By Nick Hide on 01 April 2010, 10:33am

A would-be saboteur arrested today at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland made the bizarre claim that he was from the future. Eloi Cole, a strangely dressed young man, said that he had travelled back in time to prevent the LHC from destroying the world.

The LHC successfully collided particles at record force earlier this week, a milestone Mr Cole was attempting to disrupt by stopping supplies of Mountain Dew to the experiment's vending machines. He also claimed responsibility for the infamous baguette sabotage in November last year.

Mr Cole was seized by Swiss police after CERN security guards spotted him rooting around in bins. He explained that he was looking for fuel for his 'time machine power unit', a device that resembled a kitchen blender.

Police said Mr Cole, who was wearing a bow tie and rather too much tweed for his age, would not reveal his country of origin. "Countries do not exist where I am from. The discovery of the Higgs boson led to limitless power, the elimination of poverty and Kit-Kats for everyone. It is a communist chocolate hellhole and I'm here to stop it ever happening."

This isn't the first time time-travel has been blamed for mishaps at the LHC. Last year, the Japanese physicist Masao Ninomiya and Danish string-theory pioneer Holger Bech Nielsen put forward the hypothesis that the Higgs boson was so "abhorrent" that it somehow caused a ripple in time that prevented its own discovery.

Professor Brian Cox, a former CERN physicist and full-time rock'n'roll TV scientist, was sympathetic to Mr Cole. "Bless him, he sounds harmless enough. At least he didn't mention bloody black holes."

Mr Cole was taken to a secure mental health facility in Geneva but later disappeared from his cell. Police are baffled, but not that bothered.

Source:
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/gadget...9552,49305387,00.htm

Discuss.

Jeff

See note below

quote:

Originally posted by También:
Well, he could be a crackpot; but it wouldn't hurt to stop all Mountain Dew shipments to CERN. Its not worth putting the world at risk over Mt. Dew. If the researchers want caffeine so badly, let them drink tea. In that case if the machine broke down again again we'd know Mr. Cole was telling the truth, but as it stands with the Mountain Dew still shipping we'd not have learned anything. In fact, we would probably just try to fix it again; and that could be disastrous in the light of this new intel. Once after eating numerous kit kats and Mt. Dew cans (plus one TAB), I did some time traveling of my own. His story is really not that incredible, so I stay stop the shipments.

Jeff,

The first thing I noticed on this one (after quickly skimming the first few sentences) was the date: April 1, 2010. That tells me something right there!

Now I'm gonna go back and read it.

--Linda

Bluelamp,

You NEED to check this out! I not only read it but clicked on one of the links to an article dated the previous day (March 31st). I'm pretty sure the supercollider is real, but the entire site appears to be a physics spoof site, all very tongue-in-cheek British humor. The reason I'm giving you a heads-up is because you could probably make a fortune writing this stuff. You'd make this guy look like a rank amateur!

Jeff, John and Sean would make excellent collaborators, but you could probably manage it on your own.

--Linda

quote:

Originally posted by Raksha:
Bluelamp,

You NEED to check this out! I not only read it but clicked on one of the links to an article dated the previous day (March 31st). I'm pretty sure the supercollider is real, but the entire site appears to be a physics spoof site, all very tongue-in-cheek British humor. The reason I'm giving you a heads-up is because you could probably make a fortune writing this stuff. You'd make this guy look like a rank amateur!

Jeff, John and Sean would make excellent collaborators, but you could probably manage it on your own.

--Linda

Ok, lets back up. You think its an April fools joke? If its meant to be funny, then what does Mt. Dew have to do with it? Why was Mr. Cole shipped to Geneva? How did he disappear? Why do you suspect the British are behind it?

from http://user.web.cern.ch/user/news/2010/100401.html

quote:

Physicists working on the LHC results have announced their first discovery: a hideous particle from the prehistory of the Universe

The news is historic, or rather "prehistoric" to be more precise! It has taken two physicists studying the collisions at 7 TeV in the centre of mass on 30 March only two days to make an astonishing discovery. From their precise analysis of four events, Alain Grand and Ricarda Owen have found evidence of a new, massive neutral particle thought to have existed in the very early Universe. "It's awful", explains Alain Grand, still shocked by the discovery. "It left horrible tracks inside the detector that made the physicists on duty at the time feel quite sick". No wonder. The particle consists of two strange quarks and one top quark but no beauty or charm quark. The physicists have nicknamed it the "neutronosaurus" because of its repulsive appearance and prehistoric origins.

Hints of the new particle had already been glimpsed in two events at Fermilab but the statistics were too low to be published. The four events observed at the LHC generated an exponential increase (2^2=4) in the statistics, allowing the physicists to announce the discovery unequivocally.

The discovery of the particle, which had hitherto been postulated only by an impassioned physicist doing a bit of theory in his spare time, has the potential to turn current theory on its head and to send the entire theory community back to the drawing board. "One important consequence is that all the particles we know today must have had a prehistoric twin", says Ricarda Owen. There will have been a protonosaurus ancestor for the proton (not to be confused with the many-protoned brontosaurus), the electron will have descended from the electronosaurus, and so on. It remains to be seen whether these paleoparticles had antimatter doubles, such as antineutrinosauruses and other antiparticulosauruses. "That's what we're going to be concentrating our efforts on finding now", says Alain Grand. "If they existed, we expect them tobe the exact opposite of the paleoparticles we've found so far, in other words extremely elegant". Whatever happens, the discovery has opened up paleoparticle physics as a unique and exciting new field of research!

quote:

News: 1 April 2010
High energy collisions reveal a paleoparticle

Bluelamp,

WOW!!! What a coinky-dink! Same date...that seems strangely synchronistic to me. I knew you wouldn't disappoint me, even if you didn't make that one up yourself.

--Linda

quote:

The reason I'm giving you a heads-up is because you could probably make a fortune writing this stuff.

I think he has been writing this stuff. I doubt there's much money to be made, though, because of all the skeptics and the conspiracies to hide the truth and the fact that he's so far ahead of (or possibly behind) the accepted paradigms that only a handful of others can understand what he writes.

Plus, of course, the presence of people from the future (and dead people too--almost forgot them--channeling) who work tirelessly to prevent this knowledge from being accepted, fearing Armageddon and the Apocalypse, as I pointed out before.

Jeff

But did the guy say "I'll be back"?

WHOA!!! It looks like Tambien was right and it wasn't an April Fool's Day joke after all. Okay, maybe the part about the young man from the future and the Mountain Dew, but it turns out the part about the baguette in the supercollider and the "God particle" actually *IS* true.

Check this out:
Science, Belief and the God Particle

I just found this article a few minutes ago in a Care2 e-mail. It's going to take me a while to digest this...

--Linda

From the Care2 article:

quote:

The "God particle" got its appellation from Nobel prizewinner Leon Lederman's book of the same name, subtitled: If the universe is the answer, what is the question? (BTW, scientists are reported to not like that moniker and refer to the Higgs boson as the "champagne bottle" particle. That does sound like more fun.) However, the fact that the name has captured popular imagination suggests that we are hungry for some sense of purpose to be inherent in scientific reality.

Perhaps the "problem" with science is that it has moved so far beyond any real human dimension. Check out any description of the "multiverse" and, before your brain explodes, you'll see that the only way to grasp its inconceivable nature is to be fluent in a language (theoretical mathematics) that isn't available to most of us. Scientists, in a sense, have become priests of the physical mysteries and, for many people, that creates a most uncomfortable hierarchy of powerlessness. It's far easier to envision a compassionate (or wrathful) deity that one can approach and whose punishments and rewards are couched in human dimensions. It's far easier to imagine that such issues as global warming, which will require major sacrifice if we are to slow it down or reverse it, are conspiracies on the part of those who would speak in the tongues of inaccessible scientific language and manipulate the trajectories of our lives. (And, of course, this fear is exploited by those for whom the profit motive IS God.)

Bluelamp,

You're the only person I know who is fluent in the esoteric language of theoretical mathematics. So I have a few questions:

What is the Higgs bosun aka God particle aka champagne bottle particle?

Why do the scientists conducting this experiment postulate its existence? Apparently this particle has not yet been isolated or discovered, but its existence has been inferred from something else. What was that? And now for the really hard one...

Can you explain ANY of this in layman's language? You know, Particle Physics for Dummies! It occurs to me that I've asked you that one before.

--Linda

The "God particle" (aka Higgs boson?) has something to do with why matter has mass. Beyond that, I dunno.

quote:

Originally posted by Henry J:
The "God particle" (aka Higgs boson?) has something to do with why matter has mass. Beyond that, I dunno.

Henry,

Something to do with why matter has mass. Okay. Thanks for answering or attempting to answer the question I forgot to ask, namely Why is the Higgs bosun aka God particle important?

That it *IS* extremely important goes without saying. After all, the supercollider is 17 miles long and cost $10 billion to construct (that's billion with a B). You don't put out that kind of money and all that effort unless you're pretty sure you're going to find what you're looking for. And that what you're looking for is worth it--i.e. something that will revolutionize science and our understanding of reality.

And it's a subatomic particle (just thinking out loud here). Some special kind of subatomic particle that is different from all the others previously found. Something that can only be isolated/identified/studied under special conditions and at incredibly high speeds, necessitating the construction of the supercollider in the first place. Something that is worth the expense and the effort, if the experiment is successful.

I WANT to know what it is, dammit! This is all just too exciting...the suspense is killing me!

--Linda

quote:

What is the Higgs bosun aka God particle aka champagne bottle particle?—Raksha

Linda,
     Physicists have developed a concept called the Standard Model that allows them to describe all matter and its behavior by the interaction of just twelve kinds of particles under the influence of four forces. Of the forces, two of them—called Weak and Strong— exert their influences at the sub-atomic level and are easily manipulated and measured. The other forces, called Electromagnetic and Gravitational are seen active on the macro-scale. Light, for example, is a form of electromagnetic radiation. And gravity, of course, contributes the property called weight. The first three forces have been shown to work through the exchange of something called force particles between interacting objects. It is likely that gravitation works in the same way, but its force particle has not been demonstrated. The postulated gravity force particle has been named the Higgs boson after one of the physicists who first thought of it. It has also been called the "god particle" and "the champagne bottle particle" for fairly flippant reasons. There is great hope the Large Hadron Collider will be able to produce identifiable Higgs bosons.
     Finding Higgs bosons would indicate we have grasped the true essence of reality, at last. Eventually we may be able to synthesize little realities of our own!
Seán

Wikipedia has a reasonably-clear article about the Higgs boson:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson

quote:

It has also been called the "god particle" and "the champagne bottle particle" for fairly flippant reasons.

Well, it's not exactly flippant. Lederman thought/thinks that it's very important.

quote:

the Standard Model mathematically predicts that there exists the Higgs Boson, which is the measurable particle of the Higgs field, or something else at this level of discovery. The mystery surrounding the Higgs field is the question of why is the photon without mass, but the force carrier particles of the weak force so heavy? The photon is the massless force carrier for electromagnetism, and without mass symmetry is broken between this and the other force carriers, according to the Standard Model. According to Dr. Lederman, the Standard Model shows that before the condensation of the Higgs boson, all particles were without mass. It is the interaction with the Higgs field that gives the weak force carriers their huge mass.[61]

Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...t_Is_the_Question%3F

So it's pretty important. Lederman's book is something I've been meaning to read for a long time; it's basically a history of physics. Maybe I'll do that.

Leon was a professor of mine at Columbia decades ago, before he got the Nobel Prize. I aced his course in Atomic Physics. (I took it as a sophomore--it was given in the Graduate School. I used to be smart.) He was one of the best teachers I ever had, and a very nice man too. Went on to become head of FermiLab and President of the National Association for the Advancement of Science, doing some great work on improving science education in schools in the U. S., including setting up a special school for training teachers. An amazing man, really.

Jeff

quote:

The Higgs boson is the cause of mass, not gravity.—Henry

     True. I elided there to simplify the explanation.
Seán

Jeff and Sean,

Thanks for the explanations, and for the Wikipedia link. I only had time to skim it superficially, but I can see already that it's going to be very helpful in increasing my understanding of the Universe and how it works, how everything fits together and works together. Gnosis--ONLY the most important thing in the world to me!

For that reason I may copy your posts to the Gurdjieff topic because I believe they are relevant. When I was reading them for the first time, I was immediately reminded of something Gurdjieff said to Ouspensky early on. He asserted that everything is material, even those things we don't normally think of as material and may even think of as spiritual. That's because they are composed of a much finer kind of "matter" than we normally deal with. He must have been referring to subatomic particles whether he realized it or not. The only ones he was familiar with in his time were protons, neutrons and electrons. The others had not yet been discovered.

--Linda

quote:

Leon was a professor of mine at Columbia decades ago, before he got the Nobel Prize. I aced his course in Atomic Physics. (I took it as a sophomore--it was given in the Graduate School. I used to be smart.) He was one of the best teachers I ever had, and a very nice man too. Went on to become head of FermiLab and President of the National Association for the Advancement of Science, doing some great work on improving science education in schools in the U. S., including setting up a special school for training teachers. An amazing man, really.

Jeff,

WOW...color me impressed! It's not everyone who can claim to have had a Nobel laureate as a professor (and to have aced his course, no less). I'm sure I don't need to tell you how fortunate you are--an inspired teacher can inspire you for life.

--Linda

My adviser at Columbia was Melvin Schwartz, who also became a Nobel Laureate in physics later. He's a good physicist, but his claim to fame is that when he was teaching at CalTech, some of his students approached him with some crazy idea and asked him to buy some stock in their new company. He laughed and declined.

They were Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs; the company was Apple. Schwartz is more famous for that than for his physics work I think.

I also studied with Polykarp Kusch and Tsung-Dao Lee, who were Laureates in Physics when I took their classes. Kusch was an awful human being in my opinion, and Lee was nice but his Chinese accent was so heavy I couldn't understand him half the time.

These ties don't reflect much about me--I was a math/physics major in Columbia at the right time and since I skipped undergraduate courses to do graduate work from my sophomore year on, I met a lot of the eminent faculty. The math profs were even better--but there's no Nobel in Math. But Serge Lang, Stephen Smale, Samuel Eilenberg (aka Smart Sammy, the Polish Prodigy) were people I saw every day...

Jeff

Columbia is still quite good today with Brian Greene and Peter Woit. The thing I like about those two is that they are good at writing about physics via books, TV, and/or the internet. They are physicists but are in Columbia's math department (a fairly common thing to do).

One interesting part from the Wikipedia Higgs article: "In particular, the acquisition of a non-zero vacuum expectation value spontaneously breaks electroweak gauge symmetry, which scientists often refer to as the Higgs mechanism. This is the simplest mechanism capable of giving mass to the gauge bosons while remaining compatible with gauge theories. In essence, this field is analogous to a pool of molasses that "sticks" to the otherwise massless fundamental particles which travel through the field, converting them into particles with mass which form, for example, the components of atoms."

Tony uses this description: "mass comes from the ZPF [zero point force aka vacuum energy] fluctuations of relativistic virtual ghost particles within the Compton Radius Vortex. According to Sidharth, the inertial mass of an elementary particle is the energy of binding of nonlocal amplitudes in the zitterbewegung within the Compton Radius Vortex."

Basically particles kind of get stuck to the vacuum which creates inertial mass and the resulting spacetime curving creates gravitational mass. They are actually two different things that just happen to have the same math symmetry so they get treated as one.

It's kind of an extension to Einstein's gravity (for Tony anyways). Conventional Einstein gravity is spin(5); going to Higgs for Tony is spin(6). This adds a dilation which is the Higgs vacuum expectation value. The Higgs aka god particle is kind of the biggest particle you can make using that Higgs vacuum expectation value.

As the Wikipedia quote (and Jeff) mention, this is related to the electroweak symmetry break where electromagnetism becomes a separate force. For Tony and his Kaluza Klein model, this is also where an 8-dim spacetime symmetry breaks into a 4-dim spacetime and a 4-dim internal symmetry space. The 4-dims of this internal space can be called electroweak charge, red color charge, green color charge, and blue color charge. Color charge is used for the color aka strong force.

-- John G.

Does any of that explain the electric charge values of the up and down quarks, or is that still something that just has to be measured?

I am coming into this discussion late but this isn't the first time someone claimed to be from the future.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Titor

Whyisit,

Thank you for posting the link to the John Titor story. I remember reading about it a number of years ago, and was just as intrigued by it as everyone else. Whatever else you think about John Titor, he certainly has the distinction of perpetrating the longest-running and still unexplained Internet hoax of all time.

Nobody is sure to this day who "John Titor" really was, and with ALL the geeks working overtime to track him down, you'd think someone would have succeeded in unmasking him by now. Or that he would have eventually gotten tired of the game and unmasked himself. But nobody has been able to identify him with 100% certainty to this day.

Whatever you think about his claims and his predictions, this guy was/is brilliant as all hell and a world-class Trickster. He deserves credit for that alone--there aren't too many in his league!

quote:

Predictive failures

The posts were met with skepticism when they were being posted, but it was impossible to prove beforehand that the predicted events would not happen. Because Titor claimed the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics was correct, effectively meaning that his travel was from a parallel universe and that things could occur differently than he had predicted, the details he presented were unfalsifiable.

What a truly GREAT cop-out!!! I bet Donald and Lois are just kicking themselves for not thinking of this wonderful excuse for failed prophecies on their own. You know, "the prophecy WAS fulfilled just as I predicted. But it happened in an alternate reality, in a different timeline." There is no way you can lose with that one!

Of course they are both so stuck in linear time and literalism that a cop-out like that would never occur to either one of them. Bluelamp or I would be more likely to think of it, but we are both way too ethical to use it.* Although maybe to be safe I should just speak for myself here.

--Linda

*or maybe we just don't want to get laughed out of the forum! There are a few regulars here as quick on the uptake as we are. I just happened to be the first one to read the Wikipedia link and comment on it.

quote:

Originally posted by Henry J:
Does any of that explain the electric charge values of the up and down quarks, or is that still something that just has to be measured?

Henry, yes it does but it's a bit hard to follow.

http://www.valdostamuseum.org/...tml#CRVsurfacecharge

-- John G.