As I wrote last year, I am not a fan of the reasoning behind taking the Large Hadron Collider into operation.  If you have followed this story, then you know that last fall, the attempt to start experiments failed with a meltdown of some magnets causing a significant delay.  Then this summer, there was a report of more problems with magnets, which somehow lost their ability to operate at high energies.  Over the same time period two theoretical physicists have published several papers arguing that these problems are really the future influencing the present.  In essence, the creation of the Higgs Boson is not “allowed” in the future and so bad things happen now to prevent it.

The NY Times published a brief piece on this theory in the Science section with a great quote from Niels Bohr about “crazy” theories:

“We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”

For some hilarious takes on this, read the comments on Slashdot.

Before dismissing this, it is worth remembering that many important theories started out being thought of as crazy, including evolution and quantum mechanics.  I don’t understand any of the physics in the actual papers, but have come away from reading the introductions and conclusions with a (possibly very wrong) impression, which can be expressed with a quote attributed to William Gibson: “The future is already here - it is just unevenly distributed."  The papers seem to say that just like we now know that we can have entangled particles across space, there might be a similar nonlocality across time.  Or put differently, there is no distinct past, present and future, but instead they bleed into each other.

What I like best about the most recent paper in the series is that it proposes a concrete way of testing the theory:  Make a random draw from a large deck of cards and agree in advance that if a particular card is drawn the Higgs Boson experiment will not take place (I suppose you could actually build a mechanism that automatically destroys some part of the LHC if the card comes up).  If it were truly a random process, the likelihood of drawing the stop card would be extremely low (which is why the scientists and governments who have invested a ton of time and money should agree to it).  If on the other hand the stop card comes up, then this could be seen as experimental validation of the theory that the future can influence the past!

Seems like a win on all fronts to me.  I am curious to see if this gets any traction or if we will continue to barrel ahead on the current track.