Time Travel and Higgs

I wanted to write about vaccines, but nerd-news of the week is the potential discovery of the Higgs boson, so I'll write about time travel instead. What do the Higss boson and time travel have to do with one another, you ask? I'll get to that, don't worry, but first I must explain what this Higgs thing is all about.

To start: The Higgs boson has not been discovered yet as such. Something has been observed and that something has properties consistent with the properties a Higgs boson would have, if such a thing existed. Basically, they see a bump in a line and that bump is most definitely there. Could be a Higgs boson, could be something entirely unexpected. So really, no guarantees.

Second: What is this 'Higgs boson', then? In short: It's the particle that gives all other particles their mass. A while ago, the author of PhD Comics, Jorge Cham, made a nice little movie to explain what the people at CERN are doing with their Large Hadron Collider (LHC; it has not destroyed the world yet (if you're a nerd, view the source of that site)). I've posted it below.

 

So, the Higgs boson is evidence of the Higss field and it's the Higgs field that gives particles their mass because they have to move through it. Simple, really.Now what does that have to do with time travel? It's all in Einstein's famous formula: E=mc^2. That is: Energy=mass multiplied by speed squared. 'Speed' is in this case the speed of light in a vacuum, which is pretty fast, which is why, if you would convert a given mass into energy (say in a nuclear explosion) you would have lots of energy indeed. 'Speed', of course, is distance/time, and that's where time enters the mix.

Einstein's law in action

We could also write the formula like this: E=m*(distance/time)^2. In that case, time (t) would be distance divided by the square root of energy divided by mass (sorry, I don't know how to insert mathematical formulas in HTML). This already says it all, because, as you know, division by zero is impossible! So, no mass, no division, no time. You need mass to get time! This makes the Higgs field pretty important.

The interrelation of mass and time has been known for a while. Einstein reasoned that space-time was curved. Basically, a great big mass (like a planet) makes a dent in space time, much like a ball would in a suspended table cloth. The slope of that dent is the speed at which time flows. So if you move away from the mass, time would slow. This has been proven. If you move a atom clock away from  the Earth it moves slower than it's equivalent on Earth. Of course, you can never stop time, since you would also have mass and thus make a dent in space-time, no matter how small. 


However, the formula above does not allow for mass to be negative, nor for energy to be negative. There is no such thing as negative energy or negative mass in our universe as we know it. Distance can't be negative either, since whether you go forwards or backwards, you'll still have traveled a certain distance, so that's not the way to go. It has been suggested that if you would exceed the speed of light ('c'), you would be able to travel back in time. Why? Something to do with relativity. Time is relative to speed. The faster one travels, the slower the time. Light speed is the constant here, the turning point. If you would travel at the speed of light, time would stop. This is simply how our universe works. No special reason for it. But it also means that if you would go faster than light, time would move backwards relative to you!

From 'Fake Science'

Now, this is entirely impossible. There's a reason light travels at light speed: It can't go any faster. Universe doesn't allow it. If you want to go faster, I suggest you find yourself another universe. However, for the sake of argument, let us try to at least accelerate to the speed of light. This can be done, in theory. At a comfortable constant acceleration of 1g, that is Earths gravity (9.8 m/sec^2), we would reach light speed in about a year (354 days, to be exact, you can do the math). But! But! Mass is relative to speed, to acceleration. The more you accelerate, the more you 'weigh'. You'll notice when a plane accelerates just before take-off and you're pushed back in your chair. This is because mass is slow. You need to put energy in to get it up to speed, and the more you want to accelerate, the more energy you need. That's why your car simply won't go any faster at a certain stage; not enough power from your engine. This increase is exponential and the closer you get to light speed, the closer the amount of energy required reaches infinity. There isn't enough energy in the universe to accelerate even one mass bearing particle to light speed, let alone your whole body and the ship and fuel you'd require to keep you safe and reach those kinds of speed in the first place. That's why mass-bearing particles don't travel at light speed. They can't Not even the LHC can give them the energy required.

Back to the Higgs! The Higgs field gives us mass. Cancel out that Higgs field, we would have no mass. No mass, means no energy required to reach light speed! So there you go, get yourself an anti-Higgs generator and you would instantly reach light speed! And die in the process. You see, mass is a property of your matter. Take that away and what do have? A handful of photons. Try to re-assemble those! The explosion would be rather formidable, remember E=mc^2? Well, a mass of 78.4 kg (that's me) would therefore yield an energy of approximately 7 times 10 to the 20th joules. That's about 7 million nuclear bombs of the type used in Nagasaki. I don't think I'd volunteer for that experiment.

So, what good is that Higgs, really? And that whole LHC? Can't use the Higgs to travel through time, that will never work. The LHC won't destroy the world, sine the microscopic black holes it can theoretically produce would evaporate almost instantly. You can't even produce enough anti-matter with the LHC to blow up the Vatican (as per the plot of Dan Brown's 'Angels and Demons'). Sure, anti-matter is produced, but the anti-particles almost instantly react with their normal counterparts to explode into more photons. Useless!

Of course, that doesn't negate the fact that we've gotten one big step closer to understanding our universe. And that's a pretty big deal. We need to understand the place that we live in, if we want to live in it much longer. Higgs is an important step forward. Maybe now we can have those quantum computers they promised us, please?