Revolutionary advances in 115 bullshitting

Well. It seems that some physicists have come up with the theory that the reason why no one seems able to build a particle accelerator large enough to create a large number of Higgs Bosons is because the universe is prearranged for this not to happen--the Higgs Bosons, through backwards (through time!) causation, have the effect of undoing the preconditions of their own creation. From our end, what this looks like is that anyone who tries to build the particle accelerator just ends up having a lot of bad luck and it never gets built/runs.

The paper says:

We argue that a restriction determined by a drawn card or quantum ran-
dom numbers, on the running of LHC (Large Hadron Collider), which was
proposed in earlier articles by us, can only result in an, at first, apparent suc-
cess whatever the outcome. This previous work was concerned with looking
for backward causation and / or influence from the future, which, in our pre-
vious model, was assumed to have the effect of arranging bad luck for large
Higgs producing machines, such as LHC and the never finished SSC (Super-
conducting Super Collider) stopped by Congress because of such bad luck, so
as not to allow them to work.

Here's the meat:

In the previous articles [1] we proposed that one should use the LHC-machine to
look for backward causation effects. Indeed, we proposed a model [1, 2, 3, 4] in which
the realized history of the universe was selected so as to minimize a certain functional
of the history, a functional being the imaginary part of the action SI [history], which
only exists in our model. In general, it is assumed in science that there is no pre-
arrangement [5] of initial conditions so as to make special events occur or not occur
later. However J. Bell proposed BBC as a solution to the problems of Einstein
- Podlosky - Rosen’s “super-determinism” [6]. Also, one of the present authors
(H.B.N.) and his group earlier proposed models nonlocal in time (and space) [7, 8, 9].
Similar backward causation effects have also been proposed in connection with the
story that e. g. humanity would cause a new vacuum to appear, “vacuum bomb,” by
one of the present authors (H.B.N.) and collaborators [10]. Our proposal is to test if
there should perhaps be such pre-arrangements in nature, that is, pre-arrangements
that prevent Higgs particle producing machines, such as LHC and SSC, from being
functional. Our model with an imaginary part of the action [1, 11] begins with a
series of not completely convincing, but still suggestive, assumptions that lead to
the prediction that large Higgs producing machines should turn out not to work in
that history of the universe, which is actually being realized.

Emphasis mine.

The experiment they propose is to basically do a random card game, where the result of the card game determines the upper limit of some design parameter in the machine, for instance the amount of energy it can use to move the particles around (or even, a card that says you do not build the machine at all). If you made it extremely improbable (like one in a billion billion trillion) that you would draw a number that is too low to allow for the creation of Higgs Boson particles, then you can be pretty sure that backwards causation is at work. They maintain that, if their theory is true, it is better to let the universe veto the construction of the machine by affecting the outcome of a harmless random card game rather than, say, having a worldwide recession cause the government to withdraw funding for it. (And if their theory is not true, then we will simply draw a card that allows us to build the machine such that it is capable of producing Higgs Bosons particles.)

Of course, I see a gigantic flaw with this whole approach, which is that it doesn't make any goddam sense: suppose their theory is true. It can still be the case that we draw a probable card--i.e., one that allows us to build the machine, but that the "bad luck" will end up coming from some other source, like for example the government will withdraw funding for some reason. If forcing an extremely improbable card to come up in the card game were the only causal path that could prevent the machine from being built, then the experiment would make sense, but it seems that there are a million causal paths--funding could be withdrawn, some other new discovery could draw away funding, an asteroid can hit the planet, a war could start, the principle scientists could drop dead of a heart attack, this line of scientific investigation could get discredited in the scientific community, etc etc--that the universe could utilize instead. In fact, since the "realized history of the universe" is no doubt "selected" so as to minimize the number of astronomically improbable events, I would imagine that the "path of least resistance" would precisely be for a chain of completely mundane and not-improbable events to derail the building of the machine, regardless of the results of some random card game (binding as it might be).

So, my conclusion: It doesn't matter if you got an act of Congress to make the results of the card game binding; it wouldn't do a damn thing even if their theory was true. The universe would block the construction in some other way.

UPDATE: As you probably guessed, it's not like I'm in any position to judge these things. Reading the rest of the paper (I was too excited about it to wait until I was done), it turns out that they want to try to make the probability of drawing a "restricting card" about equal to whatever the probability is of a "normal failure", since they assume that the highest probability failure option will be the one that will be utilized. Then they go into a lot of stuff that I don't understand that supposedly shows why this is a useful thing to do. In any event, someone with more mathy brains is going to have to explain it all to me at some point, and I withdraw my objection above.

But man: so neat!