Hamster in Tutu Shuts Down Large Hadron Collider

The LHC must close for up to a year at the end of 2011, says an LHC director. Story here.

Although as this is an announcement of a future shut-down, it can only be the hand of the anthropic principle in the cases where the reader of this comment is in an ancestor simulation from after the shut-down.

Boris Strugatsky is probably chuckling to himself) right now.

If this sort of thing started to happen, it would give the people with the LHC the power to, for example, decide close elections, right?

I hate religion and everything it stands for as much as anybody, but that jab just felt awkward and out of place.

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.

Whether the LHC discovers the Higgs or not, it has already provided billions of dollars worth of comic value. The NY Times article, which I'm sure Eliezer was referring to, is worth its weight in gold.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/science/space/13lhc.html?_r=3&pagewanted=all

http://digg.com/general_sciences/Less_Wrong_Hamster_in_Tutu_Shuts_Down_Large_Hadron_Collider

We should start a pool on what the cause of the next delay will be. My money is on insect infestation or the arrest of important researchers/engineers.

Birds with baguettes... and weasels/martens.

Update: They're shutting down the Tevatron particle accelerator on Friday. The funding ran out.

Fermilab "is now likely to shift its emphasis to projects that - for example - rely on particles at high intensities, rather than high energies."

In other physics news, experimenters confirmed the results of a controversial experiment during which the collapse postulate killed a God-damned puppy. Early indications suggest it has an appetite for poor lost photogenic puppies and kittens, specifically those that would never have been seen again if they hadn't been gobbled up. In response, Prof. von Shnicker spittle-spattered, "THIS PROVES NOTHING! VE VILL DISPROVE THE MANY-WORLDS IN OUR LIFETIMES!"

Apparently they assume no Higgs bosons from the high energy cosmic rays, anymore. Why?

Is the situation inside the working LHC an entirely new ballgame?

Is there nothing like Higgs boson at all, as we see no Tutu hamster in the sky?

Or it will be quite a dull party at CERN, when something nonremarkable (like Higgs boson) will maybe be discovered?

As a young man I was at some of the lectures Holger Bech Nielsen gave at that time (I'm Danish). He is a very special person, but extremely smart. I would urge everyone to see him on youtube, you will see what I mean. You do not need to master the Danish language to catch a glimpse of his somewhat eccentric nature. But do not cheat you self, he is brilliant!!. And as usual the press has distorted what he said and taken it out of context and ignored the underlying humor that was in his "unpublished essay" Nice to The NYT try to be somewhat fair! But see for you self

But did they install the anti-ice skating mongoose field (and a cookie to anyone who gets the reference without using a search engine)?

Even assuming the anthropic black-hole explanation, wouldn't we be able to run a collider off-planet somewhere? And once humans had reliably settled outside Earth and were self-sufficient there, we could run one on Earth as well.

Actually if such we believe such a theory, it affords us a sort of ensoul-ness or Buddha-nature test. Does our latest A.I. creation have a soul/consciousness/cosmic transcendental thingy? We'll put it on the Moon to observe and run the collider down here, and if we finally succeed this time (and destroy the Earth), the AI was considered worthy by the Anthropic Principle of carrying on our legacy.

Edit: we'd have to rename it though. The All-Conscious Principle?

I don't see how a hamster can impede a 724 MJ explosion.

G---r-----e-----a-----t!