

Hamster in Tutu Shuts Down Large Hadron Collider - billswift
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1eh/hamster_in_tutu_shuts_down_large_hadron_collider/

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camccann
For the benefit of anyone completely confused by this, it's in reference to
the concept of "quantum suicide", associated with the many-worlds
interpretation of quantum mechanics. The Wikipedia article explains the basic
idea: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortality>

In this case, the implication is two-fold: that many-worlds is the correct
interpretation, and that the alarmists worried that the LHC will destroy the
world are (and were) correct.

From that perspective, powering up the LHC can be viewed as a worldwide
quantum _mass suicide_ experiment. From a scientific standpoint, this theory
would predict that because (by assumption) nobody will be around to observe
any world with an operational LHC, we will observe it failing every time, and
the more careful we are to prevent possible failures the more implausible the
failures that occur will become.

As silly as this sounds, you have to admit it makes a certain amount of sense.
I mean, really, a _piece of bread_?
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/05/lhc_bread_bomb_dump_...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/05/lhc_bread_bomb_dump_incident/)

~~~
chrischen
Wait, does this mean I cannot die because if I die, I will not be conscious to
realize it?

Sweet, but what if all possible realities are of me dying?

~~~
jerf
The set of things out on the fringe of quantum possibilities (1 out of
10^100^100, for example, and beyond) is quite odd. The probability of your
body spontaneously rearranging itself to be much younger is minuscule (to a
degree of "minuscule" you've never thought about before) but non-zero, for
instance.

However, it has been pointed out that if this is true, it is actually quite
horrible. Reality may not permit you to fully die, but only a vanishing
fraction of the vanishing fraction of realities involves you being anything
like _healthy_ ; the maximal probability outcome by a long shot is you simple
hanging on to a minimal life through a series of increasingly unlikely quantum
events but never returning to anything like health.

Quantum-multiple-world believers better damn well hope it's not actually true.
Actually, we all better damn well hope it's not true.

On a similar note, while it is funny to talk about how unlikely these events
are, it seems to me that if the Higgs is offended about being observed and
quantum-destroys the universes it is produced in, the way it would actually
manifest is that it would seem that just as a particular particle collision is
about to occur that would produce the Higgs, the resulting collision would
simply conform to the probability distribution of the Higgs production, along
with all the other possible outcomes, minus the Higgs production possibility.
(That is, if it's 20% Higgs, 40% something with an anti-proton, 40% something
with a proton, it'll manifest as an anomalous observation of 50% proton, 50%
anti-proton.) The universe is not going to reach out across 10^52-ish planck
instants to do something like drop bread on a machine weeks before it would be
brought up; by far the maximum probability is that it would happen in the last
few Planck instants, for each potential Higgs production. So, it's a fun
story, but I don't see the probabilities adding up for it to be "true".
Incidentally, if true, this may be able to be experimentally observed, in that
we would be able to see the distorted outcome probabilities.

~~~
camccann
_it seems to me that if the Higgs is offended about being observed and
quantum-destroys the universes it is produced in_

You seem to be conflating the "Higgs production does something funny to
suppress the amplitude of possible histories leading to the event" hypothesis
with the "LHC destroys the world with black holes/stable strangelets/vacuum
energy state change/etc., so only futures with a broken LHC have humans around
to observe" hypothesis. The net result is similar but the mechanism is
different (unless it's equivalent in some weird quantum way--I don't pretend
to be an expert on this stuff).

In either case, if each event has a chance of occurring during a particle
collision, there must be some finite number of collisions beyond which some
event such as "a fragment of Boltzmann Bread[0] appears in a critical
component of the LHC" becomes more likely than "no world-ending event
occurring in X collisions".

In particular, there's not a need for the universe to anthropomorphically
"reach across" an extended range of time; under MWI assumptions, all the
hypothetical LHC-stopping coincidences will happen anyway in _some_ world of
arbitrarily small likelihood, but if the LHC is unexpectedly omnicidal, only
those unlikely universes will have future observers to look back and marvel at
how strange it is.

[0] Cf. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain>

~~~
jerf
"You seem to be conflating the "Higgs production does something funny to
suppress the amplitude of possible histories leading to the event" hypothesis
with the "LHC destroys the world with black holes/stable strangelets/vacuum
energy state change/etc., so only futures with a broken LHC have humans around
to observe" hypothesis."

No, I'm not. I'm really only talking about the suppressed amplitude case, as
it is the only interesting thing. "Quantum suicide" is a direct,
uninteresting, and hopefully untrue trivial consequence of MWI, and
generalizing to civilizations is also trivial.

""a fragment of Boltzmann Bread[0] appears in a critical component of the LHC"
becomes more likely than "no world-ending event occurring in X collisions"."

Ah, but you're getting caught up in the wrong formulation of the problem. The
question is not "Is sticking a bit of bread in the wrong place going to
prevent the Higgs from forming?", it is, "Given that the universe will attempt
to prevent the Higgs from forming for the sake of argument, what is the _most
likely_ way in which it will manifest?"

Does sticking a bit of bread in the wrong place do the job? Yes. But it's a
fantastically improbable manifestation of a quantum effect where merely "not
forming the Higgs boson at time of collision" is way, way less improbable,
what with the odds against a Higgs in the first place.

The probability of "bit o' quirky event plus a bit of bad design" is well in
the domain of human experience. The probability of "this is the lowest-effort
way the Universe could find to shut down the production of a Higgs" is
absurdly small, when I can easily lay out "easier" things, including simply
not making Higgs when the opportunity arises, which requires merely a couple
of quantum zigs instead of zags within very small fractions of a second of the
potential collision, rather than an enormously long chain of causation
spanning human-perceivable time frames, all of which are unspeakably huge from
the quantum world's viewpoint.

------
rms
I don't think the LHC is breaking because it will kill everyone. Science
seemed to conclusively decide that there was 0% probability of that happening.
As another explanation, that leaves some type of external force preventing the
LHC from working. Perhaps if we are living in a computer simulation
discovering the Higgs Boson could help reveal the exact nature of that
simulation, threatening the very existence of our universe.

~~~
raintrees
Does that make the movie "The Matrix" the conspiracy theorists' equivalence of
"introduce it as science fiction to discredit it so people won't consider it
possible"?

~~~
Eliezer
Sure, same trick the aliens use with the UFO cults.

~~~
omouse
It's true! I saw it in the movie The Faculty!

