Last time I talked a bit about the Many Worlds interpretation. This is the idea that the wave-like behaviour of the microscopic world extends also to the macroscopic world, that observers are quantum systems with wave-like behaviour, but that we don’t see it because our waves get lined up with the waves for the objects we’re seeing, and each part of our wave only sees one part of the observed system. Every possible outcome exists, all at once, and continues to do so even after the matter is supposedly settled. And the strange faster-than-light, backwards-in-time correlations that so puzzle our colleagues of Copenhagen are simply the result of the separate experimental observers’ waves cancelling out when they meet.
Many of the laws of physics are actually implemented by wave effects, because any sequence of events that results in inconsistencies or imbalances cancel one another out. As soon as two observers with inconsistent histories meet up, peak meets trough and nothing is seen. It never happens. On the other hand, observers with consistent histories meet peak to peak, and the probability is reinforced.
And this mechanism is very handy when thinking about time travel. Suppose Cats were to jump into his time machine and head back to kill his grandfather. (Not that he would, of course. This is a thought-experiment.) I don’t know who Cat’s grandfather is, but let’s call him Schrodinger, because a name makes him more personal. The two meet up, and Cats locks Schrodinger in a box, with a vial of poison and a radioactive trigger.
What will happen? Well, one argument says that the two are like two scientists on either end of one of these strange quantum experiments. One has observed Schrodinger survive and raise children/grandchildren and ultimately himself. (Although knowing how ungrateful they’re going to be, one can’t help but wonder why.) The other is about to make the other observation, that needs to be come out a certain way for the physics to be consistent. The fact that the first is ahead of the other in time we already know is no impediment.
We already know the answer to that. Waves will cancel, and the murder will never happen. And it will appear to be as mysteriously without direct physical cause as a photon always coming out one way and not the other. There are many ways it could happen. Maybe the radioactive trigger doesn’t. Or maybe a freak storm blows the box open in the nick of time. But some quantum decision will always come out the right way.
And so it is with the LHC. Two Russian scientists have pointed out that there’s a lot we don’t know about the Higgs boson, and one of the possibilities is that it has a particular property that makes it self-inconsistent. This is pure, windy speculation, but it is a fun speculation so let’s continue. If this is so, then any combination of components that would on physical grounds be expected to produce one would act like the two parts of the quantum experiment that cancel out. All attempts to set up such an experiment would fail, because some random quantum outcome would always come out the way that prevents it. They even proposed an experiment; by offering the universe an easy way to prevent the LHC operating, to see if they could induce miraculous coincidences.
So this is what the time-travelling Higgs boson is all about. I think it was put forward as an amusing silliness, like something written for the Annals of Improbable Research, and the science journalists have leapt on it because it is something far less dry and boring than their usual fare. A few other mainstream journalists, unqualified to distinguish whimsy from the fantastic-sounding claims of serious science, seem to have fallen for it.
There is, though, another possibility. As time progresses and possibilities multiply, there are many possible paths into the future, not all of which lead to the time-travelling grandchild. Suppose he were to jump into the time machine and travel back, but arrive in the timeline of one of the other histories – of a Cats not destined for the lightning-powered DeLorean? Is there any reason, then why his murderous plan should not succeed? There is no contradiction, because there are still plenty of grandfathers in other timelines to carry on the family line.
Because we don’t know how any putative time machine would work on a quantum level, there’s no way to tell. Being transported through the wormhole might twist all the quantum waves around. In fact, it’s hard to see how to avoid it, since there are so many more futures than pasts, you can’t possibly get them all to match up. So it’s quite possible that you could indeed go back and kill your own grandfather, and nothing odd at all would happen. You would have taken the wrong fork passing through the Trousers of Time, and nothing would be the same again.
Excellent articles but the fly remains trapped in the bottle. As you point out it is only in the mathematics that these concepts actually consistently exist. When translating them into ordinary language they cease to be descriptions of anything more real or stable than elaborate paradoxes which, for example, explain the mysteries of matter, intentionality and time (that exercised the dinner parties of Solons Athens) by creating an image of chaotic everythingness that is perhaps “useful” only in demonstrating the inevitable futility of the exercise.
On which point is the LHC a machine in the same way that the tomb of Seti I was a machine? Dont laugh, Im not Karen armstrong and dont think religion is another form if science, BUT both are beautiful masterpices of available technology built on the basis of unshakeable belief and both were clearly designed to answer questions about the nature of reality - and both were buried deep underground: for different but suggestive reasons. I also strongly suspect that the subsequent generations of adepts who used the tomb for whatever irrecoverable purpose believed it self-evidently worked.
Thank you. You are right that my explanations are only non-functional reflections of the real thing. (True reflections though, I hope.) One cannot debate at the dinner party at this sort of level and truly solve the mysteries of the universe, and I’m sure nobody here thinks so. That is a conceit of the pseudo-intellectuals.
But it was never my intention to go to such a depth. If anyone really wants to do so, then I recommend reading Roger Penrose’s masterpiece, The Road To Reality. It is written for the layman (so he says) but reveals much of the hidden machinery of mathematical ideas. If taken slowly, and by allowing the difficult parts to wash over one, I think there is a lot to be gained from it by anyone. But it is by no means an easy read. It reveals these magnificent concepts in their native habitat, sharp fangs and fierce spikes and all, rather than the limp, neutered specimens in the bare cages of pop-science books.
My aim here is a far more modest one. I intend only to entertain the dinner guests with tales of distant travels, of marvels seen. Because they should be more widely known. You cannot solve the mysteries of the universe this way, but you can see some of them.
I wouldn’t rush to make any assertions about what the Ancient Egyptians were up to. The accuracy with which their monuments were aligned and laid out speaks of a technology that even by today’s standards is not insignificant. Possibly the thing did work? It depends on what it was intended for.
And yes, there are many parallels between a huge and expensive project like the LHC, and the ancient pyramids, at least as far as the sociology goes. Yet I hope that the LHC will prove more practically useful in the long run. Quantum mechanics that was originally thought abstract and inapplicable to daily life has transformed our society. I sit now at a machine containing billions of atomic-scale transistors.
I am curious about the name; I assume it is from the story. Denistoun was rational and dismissive of the supernatural, and nearly came to a sticky end as a result of interfering with a power he didn’t understand. That’s a sentiment that has been expressed about the LHC - with the talk of black holes and time travellers. Is there anything to the allusion?
“pseudo-intellectual”: then from dated insult to mis-use of the word sociology - my dear Denistoun a stickier and less coherent end awaits.
But truth does not date, and the study of human societies and their workings suggests that people do not change, not in any fundamental way.
Is futility inevitable? Are all images of chaos - whether from mathematics or dinner party chatter - of equal weight? Truth is obscure, so obscurity is profound truth! Oh, but wouldn’t all Athenians like us to think so?
Many seek out the occult, but few are capable of finding it. Faith must be justified.
a quaint restatement of the original insult followed by an unreflected absurdity about human nature dervived from “the study of human societies” (is that Levi-Strauss; or listening to the radio) sounds like satire to me.
the equation of the meaning of “truth” with the same of “obscure” and its inevitable confusions about both would be pleasing to the Athenians to whose parties we are all strangers.
the occult is for sixth fomers
Why would you care what was said of pseudo-intellectuals? And while insult wasn’t particularly my intent, in what way is it not merited?
You believe that human nature has fundamentally changed? In what way?
You seem to have missed my meaning regarding the ‘occult’. Or have an unusually high regard for sixth-formers.