BBC Focus Magazine

[M Paul Lloyd]

Personally I think this is 'out there' along with my ideas on intergalactic fog making distant objects appear further away that they really are...... but these people are your actual qualified scientists, so they have greater credibility............. apparently..

(PhysOrg.com) -- If the latest theory of Tom Weiler and Chui Man Ho is right, the Large Hadron Collider – the world's largest atom smasher that started regular operation last year – could be the first machine capable causing matter to travel backwards in time.
"Our theory is a long shot," admitted Weiler, who is a physics professor at Vanderbilt University, "but it doesn't violate any laws of physics or experimental constraints."
One of the major goals of the collider is to find the elusive Higgs boson: the particle that physicists invoke to explain why particles like protons, neutrons and electrons have mass. If the collider succeeds in producing the Higgs boson, some scientists predict that it will create a second particle, called the Higgs singlet, at the same time.
According to Weiler and Ho's theory, these singlets should have the ability to jump into an extra, fifth dimension where they can move either forward or backward in time and reappear in the future or past.
"One of the attractive things about this approach to time travel is that it avoids all the big paradoxes," Weiler said. "Because time travel is limited to these special particles, it is not possible for a man to travel back in time and murder one of his parents before he himself is born, for example. However, if scientists could control the production of Higgs singlets, they might be able to send messages to the past or future."

Read more
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-03-lar ... chine.html

[Hyrulian Outlaw]

I really hope they got this right. In the right hands this could be the most important thing to ever happen. It still begs the question that if it does become a reality, why haven't we heard from the future yet?

[Shadowwolf]

Well they did say long shot.

It still begs the question that if it does become a reality, why haven't we heard from the future yet?

Might depend on the first generation of these alleged particles. Bit like the wormhole version of time travel, it depends on the creation of said wormhole and thus one can only travel back to the point of creation and not before.

[M Paul Lloyd]

Perhaps its what Stonehenge was intended for? The temporal terminal as it were?............................ I'll get me coat.

[Nails]

But surely the universe has seen much bigger collisions than we are ever going to create in an accelerator, so these particles could be popping in and out of 'time' (if that makes sense) all over the place.
Sure, they're gonna be really small and short lived so we wouldn't normally notice them but....

Physics is just weird.

[M Paul Lloyd]

Well I'm waiting for them to find this elusive Higgs boson particle thing, which will apparently resolve all those annoying little inconsistencies that makes current theoretical physics so difficult to pin down........ Of course if they don't find it, well now, thereby hangs a tale.

[Shadowwolf]

Sure, they're gonna be really small and short lived so we wouldn't normally notice them but....

Perhaps it is only in the region of those collisions and one would also need a massive detector that just happened to be in the right place, not like Atlas is a common piece of lab kit.

[Nails]

Sure, they're gonna be really small and short lived so we wouldn't normally notice them but....

Perhaps it is only in the region of those collisions and one would also need a massive detector that just happened to be in the right place, not like Atlas is a common piece of lab kit.

I know, I didn't explain that very well!
My point is that the LHC cannot do anythin gthat the universe hasn't already done bigger and better, so there must be some point in the universe where these particles are whizzing around for a tiny fraction of a second and if they are travelling through time then they could pop up anywhere, but we still need to be in that exact place and time with the correct kit to detect them.
Still wierd though.

Well I'm waiting for them to find this elusive Higgs boson particle thing, which will apparently resolve all those annoying little inconsistencies that makes current theoretical physics so difficult to pin down........ Of course if they don't find it, well now, thereby hangs a tale.

As I understand it, the standard model works for everything except gravity, so if they can nail down this odd property to a particle then everything is OK in the physics world.

[Shadowwolf]

My point is that the LHC cannot do anythin gthat the universe hasn't already done bigger and better,

Twas explained well by your good self, I was being a bit facetious

[M Paul Lloyd]

As I understand it, the standard model works for everything except gravity, so if they can nail down this odd property to a particle then everything is OK in the physics world.

Yes the nature of gravity is so very elusive isn't it, along with time and space they form an unholy trinity do they not? But, I always thought that the 'graviton' as an actual particle had been largely discounted as a viable concept, or am I reading it all wrong?

[Hyrulian Outlaw]

I thought the higgs boson was the mythical graviton yee speaketh of?

[M Paul Lloyd]

Possibly, but I always took it to be more than that?

[The Beige Avenger]

Gravitons are the hypothesised particles that mediate gravity (analogous with photons).

Higgs bosons are the hypothesised particles that give mass (analogous with electrons / quarks).

I think

[M Paul Lloyd]

Ah yes inertia particles, anchored to some other 'oily' dimension which resists movement which could possibly tie inertia, mass and gravity together............

Apparently if they don't find it soon it probably doesn't exist.

[EzBloke]

Hmmm.

If the LHC could send a particle backwards in time, is it possible that it would be recognisable already? Amongst the mass of data that already exists? Could anomalies that are currently reported be evidence of time travel?

And, to throw in a slight twist on the grandfather paradox, what would happen if, having spotted an anomaly and correctly attributed it to a time travel experiment from the future, the scientists were then to decide not to continue with time travelling experiments...?

There would be evidence of the experiment before the experiment was cancelled...

But that is only in a linear time theory where tomorrow is, unlike frames of a film, non-existent until experienced.

In a pre-existing frame theory where we only experience one frame at a time – but they all exist – doesn’t this paradox become, semantically, less “time” travel than a sort of “inter-dimensional” transfer? Ergo, we still have not achieved “time” travel per se?

Sooo... would this experiment help prove the existence of extra-dimensional space-time (and the absence of free will...) thereby bypassing the paradox completely?

My head hurts.
Ez

[M Paul Lloyd]

I suspect that if it did then they would surely have found a way of sending back a warning to avoid that nasty explosion that delayed things so much?

But then.... if the explosion never happens.........

[EzBloke]

Ah! But what if... that was the reasonfor the explosion...? Hmmm?

[Shadowwolf]

Oh look, turtles...