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Time traveling particles in the LHC: Part II
John Hopton for redOrbit.com – @Johnfinitum
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”.
Certainly particle backwards time-travel, while incredibly profound if it exists, has a low probability to exist. Even if the acausal events were allowed in the selection protocol, it is anticipated that their occurrence rate would be very small. So the search for the acausal theory has yet to be made, and our theory has not changed at all. One can be hopeful that future searches will occur.
RO: What would be the implications if your theory turned out to be true, for science and humanity in general?
TW: Huge implications. Finding the time-traveling particle would be the first “baby step” toward time-travel in general. One could imagine messages sent to us from the future, either from our human successors, or from other, alien civilizations. One might imagine, many, many years from now, a technology that would even allow macroscopic objects (like people!) to time-travel. But one must be patient. Think how long it took our species to develop the science that we now know–and then extrapolate forward!
By the way, this scenario presents a natural picture of why in our past up until now, we have not heard from the future: The LHC presents a special technology that can receive Higgs singlet particles and observe their decay. Before the LHC, there was no detector capable of receiving such signals.
RO: If Higgs singlets do help use to send messages through time, how would this work?
TW: Each time the Higgs singlet traverses the compactified dimension, it adds more negative observer time to its traveling. The compactifiction puts the particle back into our familiar space from which it was produced. Thus, there is a kind of stroboscope appearance of the singlet, with “subsequent” appearances occurring at an ever earlier time. The accumulation of “earlier” offers the hope of backwards time-travel.
RO: Are you optimistic about the new round of activity for the LHC?
TW: Absolutely! But not yet for the acausal events which I have described above. There is much more conventional, new physics, to be searched for first.
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Source: http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1113391746/time-traveling-particles-in-the-lhc-part-ii-051515/
