If Tom Weiler and Chui Ho Man’s latest theory is correct, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could be the first machine capable of making matter travel back in time . “Our theory is a very remote possibility”, admits Weiler, professor of physics at Vanderbilt University (USA), “but it does not violate any laws of physics.”
One of the collider’s main goals is to find the elusive Higgs boson, the particle that could explain why particles like protons, neutrons and electrons have mass. If the collider succeeds in producing the Higgs boson, some scientists predict that a second particle, called the Higgs singlet, will be created at the same time. According to Weiler and Ho’s theory, these singlets must have the ability to jump into an extra fifth dimension, in which they could move forward or backward in time and reappear in the future or past.
“One of the attractive aspects of this approach to time travel is that it avoids all the great paradoxes,” Weiler said. “Because travel time is limited to these special particles, it is not possible for a man to travel back in time to murder his parents before he is born himself, for example. However, if scientists could control production of Higgs singlets, they might be able to send messages to the past or the future, “he adds.
The researchers’ theory could be tested if physicists managing LHC tracking begin to see Higgs singlet particles and decay products appear spontaneously. If it happens, Weiler and Ho believe that they will have been produced by particles that travel in time.
The M-theory
Weiler and Ho’s theory is based on M-theory , a “theory of everything” developed by a group of theoretical physicists in which 11 dimensions are identified. This theory has led to the suggestion that our universe may be like a membrane of four dimensions floating in a multi-dimensional space. According to this point of view, the basic elements of our universe would be permanently attached to the membrane and therefore could not travel in other dimensions, with certain exceptions. Some argue that gravity, for For example, it is weaker than other fundamental forces.Another possible exception is the Higgs singlet proposal, which responds to gravity but not to the rest of the fundamental forces.
