The Large Hadron Collider was shut down yesterday by a hamster in a tutu, weary scientists announced.
The Large Hadron Collider is the successor to the earlier Superconducting Super Collider, which was shut down by the US House of Representatives in 1993 after 14 miles of tunnel had been constructed at a cost of $2 billion. Since its inception, the Large Hadron Collider has been plagued by construction delays, dead technicians, broken magnet supports, electrical faults, helium containment failures, vacuum leaks, birds with baguettes, terrorists, ninjas, pirates, supervillains, hurricanes, asteroids, cosmic energy storms, and a runaway train. On one occasion it was discovered that the entire 17-mile circular tunnel had been built upside-down due to a sign error in the calculations, and the whole facility had to be carefully flipped by a giant spatula.
One year ago, hopes were raised for the first time in decades when it was discovered that all the incidents up until that point had been the work of a sinister globe-spanning conspiracy of religious fanatics who, inspired by the term "God Particle", had decided that no one could ever be allowed to look upon the hypothetical Higgs boson. This discovery was widely considered to have undermined the theory that Nature abhors a sufficiently powerful particle collider. Though some found it suspicious that the Higgs boson would even have a religious cult devoted to preventing its observation, the affair did have a patina of surface plausibility - after all, a giant plot to prevent physicists from observing the Higgs boson makes around as much sense as anything else religious people do.
After the conspiracy was shut down by heroic international detectives in an operation so hugely dramatic that it would be pointless to summarize it here, the world began to wonder whether the LHC might really, really work this time around. Scientists everywhere held their breaths as the bodies were cleared out, the tunnels reconditioned, and the broken magnets replaced, all without incident. The price of large hadrons held steady on the commodities market, permitting the LHC's reservoirs to be fully stocked. Proton beams were successfully formed and circulated through the giant tunnel.
Moments before the first collision was scheduled to probe the theretofore-unachieved energy of 3.5 TeV, a hamster in a tutu materialized from nowhere at the intended collision point. The poor creature didn't even have time for a terrified squeak before the two proton beams smashed into it, releasing the equivalent energy of 724 megajoules or 173 kilograms of TNT.
The dispirited scientists of the LHC have announced that this will create a 24-month delay while tiny bits of hamster are cleaned out of the tunnels and anti-hamster-materialization fields are installed in the collider.
At the poorly attended press conference, journalists asked whether it might finally be time to give up.
"Nature's just messing with you, man," said a reporter from the New York Times. "You need to admit this isn't going to work out."
Professor Nicholas von Shnicker, project leader of the LHC, responded.
"NEVER!" shrieked von Shnicker, spittle flying from his lips and spattering on his ragged beard. "Ve vill NEVER give up! My father spent his life trying to make the LHC vork, and his father! Even if it takes a century, if it takes a thousand years or ten thousand million years, VE VILL SEE THE HIGGS BOSON IN OUR LIFETIMES!"
Prof. Kill McBibben is the author of the recently released book Enough, which proposes a new theory of the mysterious Counter-Force that prevents the LHC from operating. "It's not the Higgs boson going back in time," says Prof. McBibben, "nor is it the anthropic principle preventing a black hole from forming. We've just hit the point that we all knew was coming - that we all knew had to happen someday. We've reached the limits of human science. We are just not allowed to build colliders at higher than a certain energy, or know more than a certain amount of particle physics. This is the end of the road. We're done."
Here are the four papers relating to influence from the future and the LHC:
http://arxiv.org/find/physics/1/au:+Ninomiya_M/0/1/0/all/0/1
The basic idea is that these physicists have a theory that the Higgs particle would be highly unusual, such that its presence in a branch of the multiverse would greatly decrease the measure of that branch. Now I don't claim to understand their math, but it seems that this might produce a different result than the usual anthropic-type arguments regarding earth-destroying experiments.
The authors refer to an "influence from the future", and my reading is that the effect is that in a world where the future was very likely to produce a lot of Higgs particles, that would reduce the probability of that world existing (or being experienced, in the anthropic sense). Such an effect would not occur for an experiment which merely destroyed the world; such an experiment would not reduce the measure of the past. In a sense, Higgs particles destroy the past. (Keep in mind that this is a non-standard theory!)
Therefore I don't think their theory would predict our world, where it seems superficially quite likely that we will produce Higgs in the future. If the only thing that prevents it is unlikely events like the recent bird with baguette that Eliezer is riffing on, let along materializing tutued hamsters, then we are already on a branch of the multiverse whose future is full of Higgs. That should mean that our very branch is anthropically disfavored, and we should not be here.
Rather, we would expect to live in a world which never even seriously considers building an LHC. Either we would all be of a type which never developed technological civilization, or we would all be smart enough to deduce the danger of the Higgs before blundering forward and trying to build an LHC, etc.
The fact that we don't live in such a world would be an argument against the reverse-time effect, and in favor of the more conventional LHC world-destroying scenarios like black holes, strange matter, etc.