Physics has Stopped Making Sense to Me

(H/T) to MR:

Crane first started thinking about artificial black holes 12 years ago when physicist Lee Smolin, now at Canada's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, asked Crane to read the manuscript of his book The Life of the Cosmos.

Nobody knows what happens at the singularity of a black hole, the point where space and time become so warped that the laws of relativity break down. In his book, Smolin suggested that a new universe could be created and bud off. So universes in which black holes are likely to arise will give birth to more and more such universes. This means that our universe could be a baby universe, and is more likely to have come from one that is good at making black holes than one that isn't.

Crane then wondered what would happen if intelligent civilisations could make black holes. This would mean that life in these universes played a key role in the proliferation of baby universes. Smolin felt the idea was too outlandish and left it out of his book. But Crane has been thinking about it on and off for the last decade.

He believes we are seeing Darwinian selection operating on the largest possible scale: only universes that contain life can make black holes and then go on to give birth to other universes, while the lifeless universes are an evolutionary dead end.

His latest calculations made him realise how uncanny it was that there could be a black hole at just the right size for powering a starship. "Why is there such a sweet spot?" he asks. The only reason for an intelligent civilisation to make a black hole, he sees, is so it can travel the universe.

"If this hypothesis is right," he says, "we live in a universe that is optimised for building starships!"

Gattaca Tells us Nothing About Genetics

Every now and then, genetic testing advances a little bit, and people mutter darkly about an apocalyptic, Gattaca-like world. "You gotta check out this movie!" they say. "They start genetic screening for all sorts of jobs, and put in a genetic caste-like system!" Health insurance will break down, eugenics, etc. etc.

The perils and promises of genetic testing and experimentation remain to be seen. But Gattaca is a horrible way to make his point. I mean, [spoiler] the guy was prepping for a long-distance space flight, and hiding a pre-existing heart condition was deeply irresponsible and selfish. This is why we already screen astronauts; and I hope they do so in the future on genetic grounds as well. I'm sure this guy could have made it just fine as a banker; but noooo, he just had to get out there in space, and the costs in terms of mission success and the safety of his fellow crewmen just weren't his problem. Asshole.

The movie does raise an interesting point about the survival of humans during manned expeditions. In a trip to Mars, for instance, getting the astronauts back is the real challenge. This seems somewhat taboo to mention, but space exploration would be a lot easier if it were one-way. It does seem odd to spend so much money retrieving astronauts, when there are so many people willing to take the one-way ticket, and millions continue to die for want of a few dollars in health costs.

Incidentally, it looks like they're thinking of making a police procedural based on Gattaca's world. Hopefully the bioethics will be a little less butchered here.

Time Traveling Bandits

Surely you remember the Large Hadron Collider. It's a device built by physicists to test some theory none of us will ever understand, at the improbable cost of destroying the world. The device has so far failed to work. A while ago, some physicists came up with a reason why which centers on the role of... sabotage, from unknown time-traveling forces:

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.

...According to the so-called Standard Model that rules almost all physics, the Higgs is responsible for imbuing other elementary particles with mass.

“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.”

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.”

You'd think that this is the sort of nonsense which one could dismiss off-hand. But it looks like there's been some more trouble:

The Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, just cannot catch a break. First, a coolant leak destroyed some of the magnets that guide the energy beam. Then LHC officials postponed the restart of the machine to add additional safety features. Now, a bird dropping a piece of bread on a section of the accelerator has, according to the Register, shut down the whole operation.

This is getting more embarrassing by the day. They really should get this thing working so at least the Universe will make some minimum amount of sense.

Unless that would destroy everything on Earth. In which case, these nebulous forces from the future should continue to do their job:

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.

I haven't heard this thrown around, but it should also be quantum suicide at play. Imagine you flip a coin and kill yourself if you hit heads. You flip a coin, and find yourself split into one world in which you survive and another in which you cease to be a conscious entity. But from the point of view of the non-dead copies of the you, it just came up tails. You can keep flipping coins. You'll die half of the time. But from your own point of view, because you can only observe the world in which you survive, it's always tails. You are, they say, immortal in a quantum sense.

Similarly; humanity may only survive in those states of the world in which the LHC fails to operate; so of course we are alive, look around, and find that the device does not work.

I should add that none of this makes sense to me. That's fine, as there's no reason to think that our intuitions--which evolved at non-relativistic speeds etc. etc.--need to match up to how the world works. But I still very much hope that physicists one day discover that we live in a reasonable universe.