But that means time machines were built, back in the future.
So, proof that we can’t build a time machine is proof positive they WERE built.
No, it means time machines might have been already will have been built in the past future (though not the current future). [Ooh, the rare subjunctive imperfect pre-ex-future tense]
But that’s only one possibility; the other possibility is that time machines are always and forever impossible.
Well, in that alternate past future no longer accessible, I did spell “time tRavel” correctly. :o
Little known fact: In addition to causing mass, the Higg’s boson is responsible for all typos as well.
Not doubting you, but I find that a little bard to helieve.
Hence its nickname, “the Gaudere particle”.
Wow. That’s an amazingly bad pun.
:golf clap:
Ha! John Cramer’s excellent documentary Einstein’s Bridge proved that that’s just what the two alien-modified guys from the future wanted us to think. It was really killed to save all of humanity from destruction by the Hive.
I recall a sci-fi story with a related plot ( I think it was *Vacuum States * by Geoffrey A. Landis ). Every time that scientists tried to use a new particle accelerator for an experiment, something would go wrong. It turned out that the experiment in question if accomplished would destabilize the false vacuum we live in and destroy the universe. Only those alternate universes where by chance the accelerator didn’t work survived, so subjectively the experiment can’t ever work because if it does work no one will be alive to know.
So, they simultaneously demonstrated both that we live in a false vacuum and the truth of the many worlds theory; while destroying uncountable universes in the process without realizing it.
Opps,
wrong click
Are you guys sure it’s not just the Eschaton preventing causality violation in its historic light cone?
That pesky word “otherwise” pretty much sums up the problem.
Eschaton. What an interesting word.
Technically we live in the true vacuum. A false vacuum is what a Higgs boson might create.
But yeah, fascinating story. I like how it bypasses invoking the Eschaton.
The whole idea of the story is that we live in a metastable false vacuum; one that the right experiment can collapse into the more stable true vacuum.
Oh. But the whole idea of modern physics is that we live in a stable true vacuum. One that the right experiment or accident (concerning Higgs bosons of all things) can turn into a metastable but explosively inflationary false vacuum. Reality is exactly like the story. Dunno why the story mixed things up. Maybe you’re just misremembering.
No, true vacuum is inherently more stable than false vacuum, as the true vacuum is the global minimum state. If we really are living in the true vacuum, then we have nothing to fear. The problem is just that, from the bottom of a local minimum, you can never be completely sure whether you’re in the global minimum after all, until you find someplace lower.
EDIT: That’s why the original inflationary era ended, because the false vacuum that led to inflation found a lower state and settled into it. We don’t know if we’re in the true vacuum, but we do at least know that we’re closer to it than that inflationary state was.
I’ve never understood why the moderators keep deleting this thread.
Well, when billfish reported the successful creation of a Higgs boson in post #30, the only hope for saving the Universe, however forlorn, was to delete the thread. Unfortunately, it was too little and too late, and all those Universes succumbed to the rapid expansion of the true vacuum.
Aren’t you glad that in this Universe, what he did was to make a post intended for another thread and then delete it, instead?
My point was that the false vacuum and the inflationary state can be recreated (certainly by chance, conceivably by experiment) within our universe. The stability of true vacuum does not keep our universe from being destroyed. Come on, you knew that, and you would’ve realized what I meant with a moment’s thought.
But thanks for clarifying that there’s a danger of going down into a more stable state too.