The Big Bang Banana

One of my favorite topics is the subject of Lady Luck and Her relationship to Mother Nature.  Today, the NYT runs an article about how the Large hadron Collider may be re-enacting the relationship between these two ancient titanic forces and that this may be preventing the collider from functioning.  I would suggest that this is simply a case of biting off more than one can technically chew.

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Essay – The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate – NYTimes.com

More than a year after an explosion of sparks, soot and frigid helium shut it down, the world’s biggest and most expensive physics experiment, known as the Large Hadron Collider, is poised to start up again. In December, if all goes well, protons will start smashing together in an underground racetrack outside Geneva in a search for forces and particles that reigned during the first trillionth of a second of the Big Bang.

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Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No, I’m talking about the notion that 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, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather….

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This is actually rather funny.  Humans love thinking backwards. This is because it is easy as well as magical.  All humans are caught up in magical thinking: this is the way our brains are hardwired. This is why any scientific systems that use physical proof as its basis is so very difficult to do. That is, we don’t naturally wish or want to think really logically.

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We want to do the exact opposite.  So we have to have elaborate rules and many years of training to avoid jumping to conclusions or magical thinking.  When we are peering into the mysteries as to how the universe was created, the tendency to think magically is very great and has to be fought off.

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This is even more important when looking at ultimate paradoxes: if one is trained as a logical thinker, the idea that there can be paradoxes is hard to accept. All scientists want to crack paradoxical nuts and get to the meat inside.  They hate the entire business of paradoxes.

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….“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail message. In an unpublished essay, Dr. Nielson said of the theory, “Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.” It is their guess, he went on, “that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”

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Mother Nature is feminine, not masculine. Ahem. Heh. Of course, the modern post-Pisces gods are either humans elevated to god status or are male gods who have very bad tempers and want to kill all living things. Which happens to be the antithesis to Mother Nature which is about expanding, growing and living.

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Mother Nature has rules and laws, not ‘will power’.  She doesn’t sit down and laboriously rig up systems or create anything.  She is the embodiment of rules and laws.  Human ‘gods’ are supposed to create things and in the biggest case of creation, are supposed to create universes.  One of the greatest forces if not the greatest force in nature happens to be ‘random chance’.

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This is not the realm of Mother Nature but of her eldritch sister, Lady Luck.  Mother Nature didn’t exist before the Big Bang.  But Lady Luck did exist.  More about that in a moment.

. This malign influence from the future, they argue, could explain why the United States Superconducting Supercollider, also designed to find the Higgs, was canceled in 1993 after billions of dollars had already been spent, an event so unlikely that Dr. Nielsen calls it an “anti-miracle.”…

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HAHAHA.  Unfortunately, I remember the Super Collider debate.  Texas was supposed to get it so it became very unpopular for other Senators to fund it.  That is, the born again Christians who proliferate like frogs after a summer storm in Texas hated the idea of a super collider while the universities in California and the Northeast lost enthusiasm for this project when it was being parked down in Texas.

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So it died a political death.  There was one more very magical element here: Congress was on the verge of being taken over by the GOP who hated Clinton and wanted to cut spending so they cut here, there and everywhere. They were anti-spending so long as a Democrat was President.  I don’t find this process very miraculous: this is normal in the US.

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….Dr. Nielsen and Dr. Ninomiya have proposed a kind of test: that CERN engage in a game of chance, a “card-drawing” exercise using perhaps a random-number generator, in order to discern bad luck from the future. If the outcome was sufficiently unlikely, say drawing the one spade in a deck with 100 million hearts, the machine would either not run at all, or only at low energies unlikely to find the Higgs….

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Long, long ago, I wrote a story about all this.  It came to me in a dream.

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Once upon a time, about 13 billion years ago, there was no time, no space, and certainly, no universe. There was nothing at all.  This place of total nothingness existed in a non-timeframe we call ‘eternity’.  Eternity is also infinity and there are no boundaries at all, it is a very boring place since nothing happens forever.

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This dreary state of affairs is where Lady Luck lives.  Actually, since there is nothing physical or real, the only thing that can exist is a fantasy place that is very, very magical: the Lady Luck Gambling Casino of Random Chance.  This is a theoretical place where there are only numbers and calculations that run to infinity.

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At first, for a few eons of nothingness, Lady Luck had no form or shape.  But this was intensely boring for random choices so She materialized into a Being.  Existing in the matrix of nothingness was still quite boring so She accidentally created a concept: having no sense of future or past, She realized that if an infinite number of monkeys were to type randomly, over the course of eternity, they could write a Shakespeare play accidentally.

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So She conjured up an immense chamber filled with endless monkeys all of whom had their own typewriters.  She commanded them to begin randomly typing and then departed to go wander about infinity, examining all random chance numbers to see if anything interesting would happen with them.

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Non-time passed for unknown lengths that couldn’t be measured.  Suddenly, Lady Luck remembered She created this monkey system of random typing and was very curious as to see if they reached their goal.  So She went to the infinite chamber of many monkeys typing away.

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It was quite a din!  Covering Her ears, She yelled, ‘Stop!  Stop!  Now tell me if you have written a Shakespeare play!’

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She could see that the whole place was littered with bananas and was very slippery.  Carefully picking Her way through the mess, she approached one of the oldest monkeys.  It grinned at Her and pointed to a mountain of manuscripts.  She took one folio from the pile.

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‘This is “Hamlet” in Finno-uric script!’ She said.  Then She rapidly flipped through several more folios from the pile.  It was various plays like ‘Macbeth’ or ‘Julius Caesar’ written in every possible language that will ever be created by humans.  ’Oh no!’ She cried, ‘You have created a perfect paradox!’  That is, they were able to use magical typewriters to write future plays in future languages even those languages that would probably exist before Shakespeare could exist.

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‘This is impossible!’ Lady Luck said in disgust.  She was so angry, She decided to destroy the infinite monkeys and their annoying, noisy typewriters.  So She blew it all up.

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And this explosion was so huge, it became known as the Big Bang.  Or to the monkeys on earth, the Big Banana.

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