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finally, the supercollider crowd is speaking my language:
I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, *might be so abhorrent to nature* that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one...
www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13.../13lhc.html
“Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.”
I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, *might be so abhorrent to nature* that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one...
www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13.../13lhc.html
“Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.”
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East Bay
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Re: stop making sense
Sat, October 17, 2009 - 11:43 AMLOL-!
Great framework for a Sci-Fi Frankenstein screenplay!
"Otherwise distinguished physicists" tee-hee.
So is that thing beautiful, or what?
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Re: stop making sense
Sat, October 17, 2009 - 11:58 AM>“Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.”
Let's throw a bronze plaque on it and add it to the collection. -
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Re: stop making sense
Sat, October 17, 2009 - 12:06 PMThat bronze plaque will look smashing on the Sci-Fi Frankenstein. -
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Re: stop making sense
Sat, October 17, 2009 - 12:11 PM>>"If that thing ends up revealing the secrets of the universe *by never functioning properly* ...<<
Yes. Paranoid delusions of the present paradigm are mere inevitabilities in that one.
Certainly validates my personal experiences, and vindicates my world-view!
LOL-! -
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Re: stop making sense
Sat, October 17, 2009 - 12:52 PMi would love to work on that screenplay...but the pressure of getting it out there before they turn that thing on again would get to me. what would be a good allegory be?
*puff puff* -
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Re: stop making sense
Sat, October 17, 2009 - 1:13 PMIt's like looking into a mirror... while looking into a mirror... -
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Re: stop making sense
Sat, October 17, 2009 - 1:31 PMi was thinking the same thing when i saw your new pic...
or is it my pic?
this is really hard without drugs. sheesh. -
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Re: stop making sense
Sat, October 17, 2009 - 6:24 PMIt's pretty hard WITH drugs too, babe...
::puff::puff:: -
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Re: stop making sense
Sat, October 17, 2009 - 7:30 PMLOOK
you want to have particles from the future colliding with particles from a few seconds ago? You'll damn well do the drugs and LIKE it
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Re: stop making sense
Sat, October 17, 2009 - 12:05 PMyou know, if that thing ends up revealing the secrets of the universe *by never functioning properly* my life will be absolutely complete.
it's too much irony to dare hope for... -
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Re: stop making sense
Sun, October 18, 2009 - 12:39 AM>it's too much irony to dare hope for...
Hmm. It does seem to fit the criteria of the singularity... -
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Re: stop making sense
Sun, October 18, 2009 - 1:00 AMPuff or pass, tigger; it's lit. -
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flash backward
Sun, October 18, 2009 - 7:35 AMthe original novel FlashForward took place mostly in and around the CERN Large Hadron Collider
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flas...28novel%29 (I read it a couple of years ago; my wife has just started me watching the series; I get to leave when Gray's Anatomy comes on)
which reminds me:
Yo Mama's so stupid she think the Large Hadron Collider is a gay porn film. -
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Re: flash anatomy
Sun, October 18, 2009 - 9:20 AMa glimpse of sara ramirez dancing in her underwear is more than enough to cause a rip in my time/space continuum... -
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Re: flash anatomy
Mon, October 19, 2009 - 4:02 PMQuantum entangled drugs, I see the future... or past... or whenever...
unfortunately reality is never as exciting or lively as what we anthropomorphize it to be. I thought the issue was always that quantum states have no effect on the macro level and what happens at either level never really affects the other. i.e. we can ram particles up the wazoo through a time portal, but never a cat or a human (sorry Shrodinger) and likewise quantum particles can't really invade our pretty stable variety of space-time with their weirdness (and freaky haircuts and piercings and loud music).
I guess either way though we'll never really know with the CERN Hadron Collider because if it never works we'll be scratching our heads for the best guess and if it does destroy us there won't be anyone around to debate the outcome with. I can certainly think of worse ways to go.
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Re: stop making sense
Wed, October 21, 2009 - 12:13 AM>Puff or pass, tigger; it's lit.
Ipso facto. -
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Re: stop making sense
Thu, October 22, 2009 - 10:47 PMyeah, alas, jeremy's probably right. Just like trying to move every single one of one's subatomic bits from the explicate order to the implicate order at the exact same time is pert' near impossible, as far as I've been able to tell. -
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Re: stop making sense
Fri, October 23, 2009 - 9:03 AMlawd knows I been trying.
Hey its a great article though, I love these thought experiments and I love sci-fi and nothing that weird ever really seems to happen so we may as well have our fun thinking about what could be. Besides, if our universe was so unstable that particle collisions like this could end everything we never would have appeared in the first place. Particle collisions at this speed happen fairly regularly out there in the cosmos, whatever we create certainly won't be the first time this has happened. -
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Re: stop making sense
Fri, October 23, 2009 - 9:39 AMThere were experiments a while back with vibrating trays of ball bearings of different sizes. Do you remember those?
Understanding how things tend to behave at one scale makes it possible to change the scale at which the tendencies manifest or express. -
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Re: stop making sense
Fri, October 23, 2009 - 9:49 AMI do not remember those. -
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This is the maximum depth. Additional responses will not be threaded.
Re: stop making sense
Fri, October 23, 2009 - 10:36 AMSomeone noticed an attractor pattern forming in a vibrating tray of bearings and intrigue ensued; within a few iterations it became possible to control the formation, definition, and scale of the attractors by controlling the vibrations of the tray. Of course it would be impossible to control the movements of individual ball bearings (due to uncertainty), but it's only necessary to make it -somewhat- more likely for any ball bearing to travel in one of the directions contained in the attractor pattern. Whorls and double spirals were nifty, but of course the perfect fugues of 3D pyramids composed of randomly accelerating bearings were the real treat. I first saw it in Scientific American; on reflection I must have read that one in '94, so it's ancient hat. There was some business on a PBS thing as well. Applications for *that* technology are probably pretty limited.
One imagines that the basic theory could be implemented with things other than ball bearings, though.
One thing's certain - the idea behind the LHC was probably *not* to spend a gazillion dollars to satisfy stoner curiosity. -
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Re: stop making sense
Fri, October 23, 2009 - 10:50 AMi beg to differ, the physicists i've known were nothing but stoners without the stone... -
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Re: stop making sense
Fri, October 23, 2009 - 11:03 AMyeah no shit, and a sense of humor usually would have helped with the absurdities too, but very few geniuses can combine art with science and that takes a wicked sense of humor and appreciation for the absurd.
thanks loki, I will be googling furiously now. (it occurs to me that the verb googling would have likely bee considered a public nuisance crime 10 years ago) -
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Re: stop making sense
Fri, October 23, 2009 - 11:41 AMtried to google up a link and only came up with wholesalers of bearings and something about clay and a centrifuge. I got a scinetismist pal in Massachusetts that knows about it; I'll see if he has tips for better keywords.
Hate the search engine, not the googler.
My guess is that nothing short of free mastery of space and time is the goal. -
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Re: stop making sense
Fri, October 23, 2009 - 12:04 PMThey're not bearings, they're balls. This is a common misconception. The technical name for what most people call "ball bearings" is 'bearing balls'. This will not help you find the information you seek on the Internet however. A "ball bearing" is a surface that bears the force of a ball, usually both are some steel alloy but ceramics and other materials may also be used. A bearing ball is the ball that sits on a ball bearing (surface/race; yes, there are ball races...that bear balls). -
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Re: stop making sense
Fri, October 23, 2009 - 12:49 PMHOT.
Yeah; turns up the exact same links, unfortunately. -
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Re: stop making sense
Fri, October 23, 2009 - 2:29 PMall this talk of bearing balls and Trixie hasn't show up yet for a puff puff?!
quantum weirdness has invaded. -
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Re: stop making sense
Fri, October 23, 2009 - 7:43 PMSorry I got distracted by all that crazy Klingon pseudo-quasi-sex and had to go take a long, cold shower.
Carry on.
er, uh... ::puff:: -
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Re: stop making sense
Fri, October 23, 2009 - 9:02 PMheh. wish my alien-physicist ex-husband still had his really great sense of humor. but apparently that disappears when the alien DNA or alien-spirit-symbiot thing takes over. -
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Re: stop making sense
Sat, October 24, 2009 - 12:55 AMalien life forms without senses of humor must be. exterminated. -
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Re: stop making sense
Sat, October 24, 2009 - 12:09 PMlaugh? i thought i'd die!
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Re: stop making sense
Sun, October 25, 2009 - 5:50 AMDon't read the summary or anything else about this; just watch it:
www.imdb.com/title/tt0390384/
Best deadpan sci-fi humor of all time, and ZERO special effects. -
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Re: stop making sense
Sun, October 25, 2009 - 10:31 AMThey run it every now and then on the Sundance channel. It's an interesting movie. -
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Re: stop making sense
Mon, October 26, 2009 - 10:33 AMThat's the one where they time travel and kill off their other selves right?
It was a decent, though hard to follow film, and the audio mix was awful. Worth watching though. -
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Re: stop making sense
Mon, October 26, 2009 - 11:40 AMThe audio is what I always criticize on that one, fsure - for a movie in which the dialogue is crucial, making it intelligible is vital. Their film stock was decent, so.... wtf was the audio engineer up to? Was that art? Am I intended to frown, ear-squint, get annoyed, and lose my suspension of disbelief right there in the middle, like that? -
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Re: stop making sense
Thu, October 29, 2009 - 7:18 PMEveryone says they mumble too much, but I think that makes the narration consistent with the realistic dialogue.
The story is almost completely impossible to follow, because the narrative gradually self-destructs as it self-deconstructs.
By the end of the film, it's clear that the middle of the story has become totally unstable.
Basically, it deteriorates into a series of scenes in which chronology is increasingly impossible to apply in any sensible way,
because the protagonists are 2 identical sets of friends basically at wit's end in terms of repeatedly trying to undo what they think
the other 2 guys have done/ are about to do.
I think the can of worms opens because Ben gets Abe involved at all and Abe starts doing things like answering phone calls after having had it explained why he can't do that.
Getting Abe out of the process seems like an obvious solution for Ben, trying to stop the whole project from the start, but by then he's also part of the problem... or we can't be sure he isn't at least.
Consider, especially, the conversation about the possible 3rd box user.
Abe: "Did you TELL him?"
Ben: "No! You know I wouldn't tell him... unless..."
Ben can't be sure that in some time line, for some reason, he wouldn't somehow have been persuaded to tell if someone's life was at stake.
That's rough. ANYTHING could happen to these 2 guys and they might never find out why, because the reason for it happening might never come into existence.
The last scene in the movie seems to suggest that the destruction of all chronological order to the universe has probably become inevitable.
That hurt my brain.
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