The Contrarian

Here’s a look at some of the more mind-bending links that have crossed my local spacetime coordinates this week.

So the Large Hadron Collider at CERN was constructed in order to finally create — ever so briefly — the elusive Higgs boson, the so-called “God Particle.” It seems that particle physicists have been having the dickens of a time trying to verify the particle’s existence, thereby confirming quantum mechanics’ Standard Model. Well, maybe, just maybe, the Higgs boson was created by the LHC, and then it traveled back in time in order to prevent itself from ever getting created.

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.”
…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.

And according to the UK Telegraph, some British scientists have had a breakthrough in direct brain-to-brain communication…

The system, developed by a team at the University of Southampton, is said to be the first technology that would allow people to send thoughts, words and images directly to the minds of others, particularly people with a disability.

It has also been hailed as the future of the Internet, which would provide a new way to communicate without the need for keyboards and telephones.

And finally, some Perdue University scientists have published their plans to make a table-top black hole — except instead of using ridiculously huge amounts of mass to create the appropriate gravity field, they’re using electromagnetism to trap light. That’s pretty cool, but what’s cooler is that a Chinese scientist built one.

Such a device could be used to harvest solar energy in places where the light is too diffuse for mirrors to concentrate it onto a solar cell. An optical black hole would suck it all in and direct it at a solar cell sitting at the core. “If that works, you will no longer require these huge parabolic mirrors to collect light,” says Narimanov.