Feb11 Written by:admin
Monday, February 11, 2008
"The stream of stories about the Large Hadron Collider's operation is getting genuinely weird. Nineteen-sixties, little-green-monster, B-movie sci-fi weird. Not, mind you, that that's an entirely bad thing.
Latest is a group of stories that spin off from a paper published in October by pair of Russian physicists, who – in a display of serious, but also seriously speculative mathematics – theorize that the LHC's operation could in fact "lead to the formation of time machines (spacetime regions with closed timelike curves) which violate causality."
New Scientist offers a cover-story look at this idea, but if you really want to get a sense for how science reporting goes sensational, check out the British Sun's tabloid version:
Two scientists claim the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - a giant atom-smashing machine - could open the door to unexpected visitors from the future.
The machine, due to come on stream this year, has been constructed at CERN, the European particle physics centre near Geneva.
And the scientists' calculations show it is possible the machine will tear a hole in the fabric of space and time, creating a gateway to tomorrow.
That means, with sufficiently advanced technology, people from the future might even be able to walk through it. ... The year 2008 might then become "Year Zero" for future time travelers, since it would only be possible to travel back as far as the first doorway in time.
Again with the caveats: I'm not nearly enough of a mathematician to critique the Russians' argument. But it's based on a series of very iffy ifs. It takes an idea from string theory and quantum gravity theories that tiny black holes could be created by the proton-proton collisions at the LHC.
That's generally viewed as extremely unlikely, even by many dedicated string theorists, at the energy levels reached by the LHC. But, OK, say all the features of the universe do line up in the right way, and the tiny black holes are not only possible, but within the LHC's reach. At this same black-hole energy level, wormholes could be created, the Russian scientists argue:
A wormhole forms a handle-like geometry, whose two mouths join different regions of spacetime. If the wormhole is traversed from mouth to mouth, it acts as a time machine allowing one to travel into the past or into the future.
In the best of the reporting on this idea, LHC-affiliated scientists are politely very, very skeptical."
News Source Wired
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