The New York Times has been following the saga of the European Union’s money- disintegrator called the Large Hadron Collider; a collection of finely crafted useless objects that periodically blows up … at cost of billions of Euros.
A group of scientific participants suggest that the machine is short- circuiting itself because of a latent understanding that its desired output – the Higgs bosun – is abhorrent to physics, which allows the dead hand of the future to reach back through time and burn out the machine.
Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, put this idea forward in a series of papers with titles like “Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal” and “Search for Future Influence From LHC,” posted on the physics Web site arXiv.org in the last year and a half.
According to the so-called Standard Model that rules almost all physics, the Higgs is responsible for imbuing other elementary particles with mass.
“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail message. In an unpublished essay, Dr. Nielson said of the theory, “Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.” It is their guess, he went on, “that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”
Whether this is true or not is beside the point, which here is deemed to be how to describe what is happening right now in the world’s economy and society. The answer is nobody knows, I certainly don’t … I cannot see the whole world and can only come up with crazy ideas that seem to fit circumstances. One such crazy idea is that peak oil took place in 1998. Another is that inflation and deflation take place at the same time. Another is that industrial mass production is obsolete. Crazy ideas in other contexts make the most sense at times:
Sure, it’s crazy, and CERN should not and is not about to mortgage its investment to a coin toss. The theory was greeted on some blogs with comparisons to Harry Potter. But craziness has a fine history in a physics that talks routinely about cats being dead and alive at the same time and about anti-gravity puffing out the universe. As Niels Bohr, Dr. Nielsen’s late countryman and one of the founders of quantum theory, once told a colleague: “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”
And so it is with the economic crazy ideas. The conventional, buttoned down approach does not apply. Some other forces are at play; maybe the Treasury is abhorrent to nature … who knows?
Meanwhile, the tension between inflationists and deflationists intensifies. The deflationists are screaming for a stock market crash, a debt collapse, a coupon rout in bonds, a seizure in commercial real estate … I wonder if the people who are wrenching themselves inside out are aware that the human costs of a collapse must balance against the purity of their abstractions. Of course they do, economics is both the dismal science and the dismal art.
The Schumpeterian creative destruction that is either inevitable or desired lists heavily in the direction of destruction. Our country and our society – which now must include the great masses of the world’s people – are not in a creative ‘space’ right now. No better example exists than the Large Hadron Collidor, which is better titled the Large Subsidy Collector. In ages past, the sovereign would expend the crown’s largess on public works that would be seen and enjoyed by all. There would be public gardens, waterworks, canals, promenades lined with trees and statues, parks, public buildings and music, art, spectacles and other embellishments to promote the sense of the sovereign as a benefactor to human progress and delight (instead of a raving tyrant).
Instead, the sovereign spends billions on a collection of underground tunnels lined with magnets. This is when not building the best ground attack aircraft imaginable. These things are not seen or enjoyed by anyone except the contractors paid to repair them.
The ‘creative types’ today go into advertising. What are they selling? Civilization? No, automobiles, real estate, ‘credit products’, toiletries, clothes, cheap junk from Chinese factories … we have skipped real creativity; headed past ‘Go’ and descended to banality. Physics probably finds this abhorrent as well and there will certainly be hell to pay.