Tuesday, September 12, 2006

The End of the Universe... or not.

After coming across an article about CERN's Large Hadron Collider, and the possibility of catastrophe that this will introduce when it is turned on, I started thinking. I have come to the conclusion that the catastrophes mentioned are, in fact, not going to bother us.

The article also mentioned the similar hype that surrounded the RHIC when it was first started. I maintain that this particle accellerator did indeed produce the strangelets that everyone was worried about, and these strangelets did in fact destroy the planet as they were supposedly going to. However, we never saw this.

This can be explained fairly simply by putting together a few of the more unusual principles to come out of recent physics. First up is the "multiple universes" interpretation of reality, which we can use to claim that every possibility (including those so totally bizarre that I'm not even going to attempt to think about them) plays out in a separate universe. This is fairly well accepted among science-fiction and fantasy authors and readers.

Secondly, the "Anthropic Principle" comes into play. This takes various forms, but can be boiled down to this: "conditions that are observed in the universe must allow the observer to exist". This means that the universe is in the state that it is in because that is the only state of the universe that can contain us to observe it this way. This view is commonly seen as weird.

When you look at these two in conjunction with the "Quantum Suicide" thought experiment, you get an interesting result - only the version of the "suicidee" that survived will be able to interpret this fact (the other version is no longer conscious, therefore doesn't count), meaning essentially that he cannot die.

Now apply this to the entire population of Earth. Treat the RHIC and the LHC as a planet-wide quantum suicide experiment. The result of each usage of these colliders is a number of alternate universes, each of which has had something different happen. In many of these universes, we're all dead.

Thank goodness my reality exists only inside my head!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

After coming across an article about CERN's Large Hadron Collider, and the possibility of catastrophe that this will introduce when it is turned on...

I'd be interested where you read this, thanks.