Construct a platform which is held up by a bar. Design the mechanism so that on a certain date the bar will automatically be pulled from the platform. Once the bar is pulled, the platform would be designed to dump whatever is on top of it (nothing will be placed on top of it) into a large hole. The hole will have sensors in it which will detect whether or not a large amount of gold has been dropped into it. If anything other than 2,000 pounds of gold falls into the hole, the “on” signal will be sent to the LHC.

Another way to make the future give you what you want by threatening to blow up the universe. Isn’t violence great?

…we now have a method for making people immortal. Think about it.

Hook up General Johnson Jamison to a machine which will monitor the general’s lifesigns. Design the interfact to turn the LHC on if the general dies. If the paradox holds true, what will happen is, the LHC will prevent the general from dying in order to stop the “on” signal from being transmitted to the LHC.

http://arxiv.org/

and actually _read_ these papers. They are fascinating, even to those of us whose math is no longer up to reading them with critical rigor.

The hysteria about the LHC is one thing, but the massive resistance to Nielsen and Ninomiya’s ideas is even more astonishing to me. They are crystal clear, of course, that their hypothesis about the LHC potentially violating the conservation of the baryon number, and thus being unable to function because initial conditions must lead to a future in which baryons are conserved, is very unlikely to be true.

Their point is that they have some mathematical reasons to suspect that it might be, and an interesting proposal about how to test it. It is an entirely rational paper, to say the least.

All I know is that there has been no more exciting time to be alive if you’re a physics lover. As for black holes consuming the earth, all science points to that not happening, and it’s good science. We didn’t fall off the earth into the mouths of dragons, right?

I would also suggest that once the LHC is running, and it is my guess that it will be, the folks who have been worried about the end of the world take a close look at themselves and their attitudes. See if you can figure out why you have been so distrustful, afraid, and negativistic. You’ll have time.

How exactly are we to determine what is “completely impossible” without first testing the limits of what are “probable” and “improbable?” Then, how are we to truly determine with logical certainty that something is “completely impossible” simply because we have not observed it?

Your comment betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the scientific method and of the problem of inductive knowledge. If our culture had proceeded by your rubric for scientific advances, we’d still be living in mud huts and hunting and gathering. We certainly wouldn’t have the thrill of posting comments on the Internet.

As “highly implausible” as a run on the banks? As “highly implausible” as a 500 year flood happening twice in 10 years?

Mike, if the possibility of causing great harm is only “highly implausible”, I suggest that physicists wait until it is “completely impossible” before proceeding. The discoveries that are promoted by the CERN people are not worth that much to the average person and do not justify risks of this nature and magnitude.

Remember when reputable scientists were saying that the atmospheric nuclear tests were not risky? We are still dealing with the effects of that blunder almost 60 years after the fact.