We live in a fascinating world, and new discoveries are being made every day! In honor of this, every Sunday I will be writing a post about what’s going on in the world of science, science fiction, or some combination of the two.
A lot of science fiction relies on the concept of time travel to move the plot. There are rifts in the time space continuums, time travel machines, wormholes, blackholes, but very few actually make much sense. There's usually a lot of hand waving and made up particles when it comes to time travel. However, when they're good, they're really good. Maybe now that the Large Hadron Collider is searching for the Higgs boson, or "God particle", we'll have a better explanation for us science fiction nerds out there.
Professor Thomas Weiler and graduate fellow Chui Man Ho are predicting that if the collider can produce a Higgs boson, then it will also produce a second particle, the Higgs singlet, in the same collision. These singlets would have the ability to jump forward or backwards in time via the fourth dimension. Much like the tachyon, the particle is purely theoretical, but doesn't break any of the standard laws of physics.
If the Higgs singlet is real, then Weiler and Man Ho believe that, while the particle will not enable actual time travel, physicists might be able to harness them to send messages through time. While this may not explain the adventures of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, A Wrinkle in Time, or When You Reach Me (a book I reviewed here), it's still one step closer to exploring the real world possibilities of time travel. And that's still pretty cool.
Source: http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=33021
My brain hurts just from thinking about this! Very, very cool.
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