The Future and the Shape of Time

News cutting from the NY Times on the Large Hadron Collider, following a series of ongoing glitches: a 'crazy enough' theory on the future folding into the present. The process of 'boundary conditions' is described, and a comment from a reader describing the shape of time as rapidly branching tree.

'...the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished 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...'

'Dr. Nielsen admits that he and Dr. Ninomiya’s new theory smacks of time travel, a longtime interest, which has become a respectable research subject in recent years. While it is a paradox to go back in time and kill your grandfather, physicists agree there is no paradox if you go back in time and save him from being hit by a bus. In the case of the Higgs and the collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus. Although just why the Higgs would be a catastrophe is not clear. If we knew, presumably, we wouldn’t be trying to make one.

We always assume that the past influences the future. But that is not necessarily true in the physics of Newton or Einstein. According to physicists, all you really need to know, mathematically, to describe what happens to an apple or the 100 billion galaxies of the universe over all time are the laws that describe how things change and a statement of where things start. The latter are the so-called boundary conditions — the apple five feet over your head, or the Big Bang.

The equations work just as well, Dr. Nielsen and others point out, if the boundary conditions specify a condition in the future (the apple on your head) instead of in the past, as long as the fundamental laws of physics are reversible, which most physicists believe they are.

“For those of us who believe in physics,” Einstein once wrote to a friend, “this separation between past, present and future is only an illusion.”

Following the published article was a great comment...

'So many naysayers! And it seems less knowledge leads to a stronger opinion.

The many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory could explain the "fate theory" pretty nicely. Simply stated, it says that at each instant history branches out into as many paths as there are possible quantum states - a quite fast branching tree. In each path we experience what that path is like. So the cat is dead and alive and stays that way. We just experience a different outcome in each different paths.

Now, if something 'bad' happens when a machine like the LHC or the SSC is successfully activated then we are not going to be there to experience it. Maybe, these machines seem to fail because these are the only history paths in which we are still alive to notice what happened... and read about it in the NYT!'

Mistranslation: how do these very spacial models challenge the constructs of biology, how does it suggest a non-linear interpretation of life - biology - and biotechnology.

Link To NYTimes Article