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 Originally Posted by Ragnar4
I don't know if this was posted here, but an interesting thing is being tossed around by those crazy kids at Harvard in an attempt to explain why the Hadron Collider keeps breaking.
The first test the Hadron Collider is attempting to replicate is the creating of a Quark without a sister Quark. This particular physical entity is basicly a spark of energy that moves in a predictable manner. They are all over the place, travel through human bodies doing no damage, etc etc. The only thing that is really wierd is that every quark has a sister. They've figgured out how to isolate a quark and its sister, and they've separated these quarks through extreme distance and no matter what they do to the quark, the sister quark experiences the same change. If one is moving in its predictable pattern, so is the other, if the pattern is altered for one, it instantaneously alters for the other with no time difference for the other.
This property is called quantum entanglement. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement
Somewhat related: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_teleportation
So creating creating a quark without a sister is a scary prospect right?
Harvard suggests that it's not possible for a quark to exist without a sister,sooooo they are theorizing currently that the reason the maching breaks every time they try to do this experiment is: (no seriously) They enter a time line in whcih they create the quark without a sister, The sister must exist, so it suddenly materializes into existance in the future and [i[travels in time[/i] back to the exact moment the first quark exists. There are several laws of physics being broken here, but the most important of which involves the creation of energy out of nothing. The time travel part is a bit dicey too.
Anyway the massive amount of energy and temporal disturbance, and physical impossiblity of the quarks existince causes the quark to have no other option but to sabotage the Hadron collider a split second before the machine wraps up and fires causing the firing of the atom to not occur and closing that timeline causing a grandfather paradox (see also every terminator movie/book ever made) and we skip along merrily never knowing anything about the situation.
This stuff is mostly over my head but a couple things about this idea seem wrong (and that's within the context of modern-day physics which is insanely weird). It sounds like they are talking about supersymmetry among elemental particles, which is related to (but not entirely dependent on) string theory. Surely the energy can be accounted for somewhere-- the collisions are in the tevatron range. The part about the sister quark traveling back in time is a bit dicey too, although time travel does not violate any physical laws (it just requires among other things a massive amount of energy). Still, in this context, that seems wrong. I'd be more likely to think that the particle would instantly evaporate instead, in something like a trillionth of a trillionth of a second.
The solution to the grandfather paradox, as I understand it is multiple timelines. The grandfather paradox goes something like this.. if you go back in time and kill your grandfather before he meets your grandmother, how can you possibly exist. Via the multiple timelines solution, it's very simple. The man is no longer your grandfather. He has 1/4 your genome, but you've entered into a different timeline where it no longer matters. If their idea is correct (and somewhere along the line it likely isn't), I don't really see where the problem is or why or how the machine would be sabotaged. More likely is just that it's such a massive machine that's taken over a decade to build and it's an engineering problem.
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