Apparently, Higgs bosons created in an alternative future can alter the present.

[kashiark]

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2009/10/is-a-time-travelling-higgs-sab.html
Can you believe this? I guess we all need a good laugh every once in a while.

 

[Naty1]

According to a science channel video on the LHC the magnets overheated because of faulty power connections...that is in the connectors conducting massive currents at the magnets...that part of the mess had nothing to do with Higgs particles...just massive currents heating slightly imperfect conductors..

As for the rest, it's not so much more crazy than space and time being curved by mass/energy/pressure and so forth...

As one famous sceintist exclaimed at a theoretical physics conference "We are all agreed your proposal is crazy. What dividies us is whether it is crazy enough"

 

[hamster143]

that part of the mess had nothing to do with Higgs particles...just massive currents heating slightly imperfect conductors..

The argument is that universes with lots of Higgs particles are much less probable than universes without them. Therefore, if you start with a set of universes that simultaneously start constructing an LHC, only a relatively small measure of them will actually succeed in seeing Higgs particles. In most, the search will fail for some reason, maybe because of funding cuts, a chain of equipment failures, a terrorist attack on CERN, etc.

In other words, a priori probability of success of any large-scale high energy experiment is suppressed by the number of Higgs particles it produces if successful.

I think there's some good physics there, and the amount of ridicule it received in blogs was not justified.

An obvious way to falsify the theory is to wait and see ... their prediction is that, basically, that it will likely meet with some sort of misfortune ANYWAY, even if we choose not to do their experiment and proceed with construction. If it comes online, reaches full design energy of 14 TeV, and we see Higgs bosons, they are wrong. If it falls apart or ends up being not much more powerful than Tevatron, thanks to more bad luck, they may have something.

 

[Norman]

Here is a link to the actual preprint all those blogs are talking about: http://arxiv.org/abs/0802.2991

I have been casually reading the preprint since I know Nielsen is known as brilliant theorist. I agree with hamster that his ideas are getting too much ridicule. If you actually read his paper, the tone and language used are very cautious and the authors seem to understand how odd their ideas are.

 

[schiz]

Ahh, I actually made an account just to come and ask about this article. Nice to see that someone has answered to this article already.
I'm not an expert, but even to me the theory/proposal in this article sounded a bit... improbable.

 

[Bob_for_short]

Fortunately there is no Higgs boson and future experiments at LHC will show to what extent our massless "gauge" theories and their stop-gaps, like Higgs mechanism, are wrong. I foresee there some nice discoveries that are not described with SM.

 

[schiz]

Fortunately there is no Higgs boson

Why are you so sure about that?

 

[Bob_for_short]

Why are you so sure about that?

It's a long story. Nowadays there are many "things" in physics that do not exist. For example, bare particles, point-like particles, free particles, etc. Some are patches for awkwardly made theories, some are just classical rather quantum notions.

 

[kashiark]

"Fortunately there is no Higgs boson"
A lot of people say that, but I've never read about any alternative. What's another explanation?

 

[Bob_for_short]

"Fortunately there is no Higgs boson"
A lot of people say that, but I've never read about any alternative. What's another explanation?

You know, the SM is a gauge theory with initially massless particles. There is always a possibility to construct a phenomenological QFT which is not a "gauge" theory and the particle masses are just the experimental ones.

 

[kashiark]

Why would they have those masses, and why would only some particles have masses?

 

[atyy]

"Fortunately there is no Higgs boson"
A lot of people say that, but I've never read about any alternative. What's another explanation?

http://www.physics.ntua.gr/corfu2009/Talks/guido_altarelli@cern_ch_01.pdf

 

[vanesch]

Is this the discovery of the first "improbability drive" ? :tongue2:

 

[GreyBadger]

You know, the SM is a gauge theory with initially massless particles. There is always a possibility to construct a phenomenological QFT which is not a "gauge" theory and the particle masses are just the experimental ones.

I was at a conference recently, talking with a few theorists. What they pointed out to me is that we have a redundancy in our gauge theories - We have unmeasurable phases (i.e. the spacetime localised SU(N) parameters), and arbitrary gauge choices. One doesn't need, in general, a gauge structure to give rise to the phenomenology we see (at least in the strongly coupled sector).

 

[Bob_for_short]

Why would they have those masses, and why would only some particles have masses?

Some masses, like electron, proton masses are phenomenological. They follow from experiments. Some others can be calculated from them, like Hydrogen mass, for example.

Non-gauge theories can also be formulated without divergences. I mean, with correct understanding what is what and how physical degrees of freedom exchange with energy-momentum.

So far theorists practise interactions including self-action, that's the root of UV divergences. Together with renormalizations (that remove the self-action corrections to constants) it may sometimes "work" but the physics remains wrongly understood.

I tried to explain this in my publications. I made the exposition so simple that any graduate student can easily follow it. It is a better, sane direction of physics development.