The Collider will help us understand the nature of the atom and advance our understanding of the physical universe. Too bad our country is shortsighted . We cut off a project in 1993 near Dallas Tx after 14 miles of tunnels had been dug and $2 billion spent.
Typical of a gvt. Project it was drifting to costs well above estimated. However the idiots in Congress came up with the following brilliant justification for scrapping the project.
Quote:
The project was canceled by Congress in 1993. Many factors contributed to the shutdown of the project, although different parties disagree on which contributed the most. They include rising cost estimates, poor management by physicists and Department of Energy officials, the end of the need to prove the supremacy of American science with the collapse of the Soviet Union, belief that many smaller scientific experiments of equal merit could be funded for the same cost, Congress's desire to generally reduce spending, and the reluctance of Texas Governor Ann Richards and President Bill Clinton, both Democrats, to support a project begun during the administrations of Richards's Republican predecessor, Bill Clements, and Clinton's Republican predecessors, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.
Superconducting Super Collider - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A blogger at fq(x)community writes that the collider could cause a time warp ripple that would shut it down before it completes it's task.
FQXi Community: Articles, Forums, Blogs, News
Quote:
One of the basic assumptions of classical physics is that time flows in one direction and that when describing a physical system one needs to know the equations of motion and the initial conditions in order to predict the future behavior of a classical system.
However, quantum mechanics changes this a bit. Classical mechanics can be formulated in such a way that one sets up an “action” integral. The solution to the physical system can be expressed as the path that minimizes the action integral. It turns out that in quantum mechanics one needs to not simply take one path—but take the sum over all possible paths. For example, if you want to work out how a photon gets from a lightbulb to your eye, you need to take into account not just its straight-line trajectory, but contributions of all possible paths it could have taken, including paths where the photon bounces round the room. It's a bit strange, but it seems to work and 60 years+ of detailed experiments have confirmed this description over and over again to remarkable quantitative precision.
The authors of this paper claim to show that other terms can be added to the quantum mechanical action that are consistent with current theory and experiment. However, some of these possible terms include conditions in the future that need to be taken into account and summed over. That is to say, what happens in the future could (according to this paper) affect what happens in the present.
Why the LHC? The authors argue that these sorts of time-violating interactions could be associated with whatever new particles we create at the LHC. For example, the production of a large number of Higgs particles in the future could have a backwards-in-time causal effect on the machine that produced them, stopping the machine from ever running.
Now get this!! The authors (two well renown professors... Holger Nielsen, of the University of Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya, of Kyoto University ) argue that the shut down of the TX collider could be evidence of this hypothesis.
Quote:
As possible “evidence” for such a backwards-in-time effect, the authors cite the now-canceled Superconducting Super Collider (SSC)—a particle accelerator that was meant to hunt the Higgs and was partially constructed in Texas before Congress pulled the plug on the project. As the authors write in their paper: “Such a cancellation after a huge investment is already in itself an unusual event that should not happen too often. We might take this event as experimental evidence for our model in which an accelerator with the luminosity and beam energy of the SSC will not be built.”
It's as though the Higgs plays the role of the time traveler who goes back to the past and murders his grandfather, thus preventing his own birth.
lol... that's what passes as serious scientific theory today.
