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Time-traveling particles in CERN’s Large Hadron Collider – Part II
In Part I, Vanderbilt’s Professor Tom Weiler laid out for us his theory of how the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) might produce time traveling particles. Here, in Part II, we find out what he expects for the future of the LHC and his theory, and what the theory’s realization could mean for mankind.
RedOrbit: In 2011, your theory about time traveling particles was based on what the LHC might produce. Has your theory changed at all, and are you as enthusiastic about it, given what we have observed (or failed to) from LHC activity since then?
Tom Weiler: The data obtained at the LHC is immense. About a billion proton on proton collisions occur every second. Many interactions produce thousands of secondary particles. About one petabyte of data per day can be recorded. This is huge amount, but still a small percentage of Nature’s total output. So the LHC experimenters must first eliminate some data with a software protocol (called a “trigger”).
Subsequent to our work, we learned that the triggering assumes cause and effect, i.e. any events with a decay vertex preceding a production vertex are assumed to be background noise and not recorded.
Given the huge amount of raw data produced by the LHC collisions, this trigger is sensible. It is sensible to look first for big needles in the haystack, and later for small needles. By “big” and “small” here I refer to the a priori human probabilities assigned to the existence of the “needles.”
