On whether or not the Large Hadron Collider would produce time traveling bosons that nature abhors so much that it would rather give me several million dollars

Introduction

The Large Hadron Collider has had some awful luck. So much so that even before this week’s absurd baguette incident, internet crazies had already been wondering aloud whether or not God was trying to prevent us from firing the particle smasher up.

But among this ruckus of doom-mongers, the voice of Holger Bech Neilsen incurs my ire less than most. This is, perhaps, because he is “one of the fathers of string theory”.^[1]

Neilsen and his colleague Masao Ninomiya have published a few papers^[2][3] outlining a far-fetched theory that the successful operation of the Large Hadron Collider might create a particle that would go back in time and interfere with the initial start of the machine. Because such a paradox cannot occur (Neilsen and Ninomiya speculate), the universe is constrained in its options, so that it must select even the most improbable disruptions to the LHC’s mission before it accepts the impossible paradox that would ensue from the machine’s launch.

Neilsen and Ninomiya go on to speculate that the US government’s abandonment of the Superconducting Super Collider was driven by this very same paradox-aversion, and that perhaps even the fall of the Soviet Union was affected by the universe’s need to reduce our political motivation to outshine the Russians by finishing the Super Collider.

Our strange scientific duo follow their diagnosis with a prescription: CERN (the organization that runs the LHC) should create a computer program that simulates a random card draw out of a deck of 10,000,000 cards. One of these cards will be designated the “halt” card. If that card is drawn, CERN should shut down the LHC project and console themselves with the fact that they’ve at least bought some information about temporal paradoxes with all of their billions of dollars, and perhaps avoided the asteroid strike or killer earthquake that otherwise may have been required to shut the collider down.

The CERN people have mostly laughed at this idea (as have I), but I wonder if in some back room they haven’t played the game anyway, just out of curiosity.

Now I’ve thought long and hard about a way that I might be able to stop the LHC myself, because if I could come up with a way in which I was willing and able to stop it, I could conduct an experiment of my own to test the theory of the boson paradox.

Methods

I figured that anyone with a few million dollars could probably launch a decent focused political advertising campaign in Switzerland and get the LHC shut down. Our hypothetical millionaire also would be greatly aided if he could demonstrate that he had set up and won something like Neilsen and Ninomiya’s “card game”, and thus been ordained as a sort of prophet of the universe and charged by God or Fate or what-have-you with the mission of stopping the natural or political calamity that might ultimately be invoked to stop the abhorrent time paradox. The newspapers would eat this up, I think, and the people would listen.

SO – I bought two lottery tickets – one with a jackpot of $39 million and winning odds of 1:175,711,536, and one with a $5.1 million jackpot and odds of 1:25,827,165. I reasoned that with the lesser jackpot and easier odds of the second ticket, I’d approach Neilsen and Ninomiya’s rigorously determined optimal halt card odds of -10⁷, while with the bigger ticket I’d have a chance of winning more money if that’s what would actually be required to shut the LHC down.

Next, I took a solemn vow to spend half my post-tax winnings on a campaign to stop the collider, and I recorded this prophetic video for posterity:

Results & Analysis

I didn’t win.

There are at least a few possible explanations for this:

(1) I would not have been able to compel European voters to shut the LHC down with my money and story.

(2) Something more probable that my winning has been nominated as the LHC stopper.

(3) The universe is stochastic, containing both deterministic and non-deterministic elements, and some of those deterministic (albeit chaotic and therefore pseudo-random) elements are the the machines involved in the selection of my lottery numbers and the winning numbers. There was therefore no statistical wiggle room whatsoever in my lottery play, and my chances were zero all along. (Neilsen and Ninomiya, probably because they had considered something like this, suggested that the card-game emulator be quantum based.)

(4) There are no time travelling paradox-causing bosons.

Conclusion

While I’ve come up with ways to test some of the other possible interpretations of my results that I’ve listed, my favorite hypothesis is #4. I will therefore predict that the LHC will someday soon indeed start.

But if it doesn’t, you can expect me to run another experiment to test interpretation #3.

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