Day 13: Higgs Singlet

News broke from the Large Hadron Collider the other day that, theoretically, time travel can work. Not on any large scale, of course, because my dream of one day capturing and training an ankylosaurus, then riding it into battle at the head of a column of tanks to defeat Genghis Khan is simply too much to realize without tearing reality’s very fabric by its sheer awesomeness. Rather, the theory revolves around the (probably existent) Higgs singlet, a tiny particle that can jump through time in ways denied anything else we’ve yet encountered. If one could control this jumping (or not jumping) to a given place in the space-time continuum he or she could send messages back to anyone with the ability to monitor the singlets. Which the LHC can maybe do. Meaning we could, at any given moment, find a message from the future waiting for us, warning that aluminum actually causes more cancer than asbestos or that the Prius winds up wiping out humpback whales. It is highly, highly unlikely that this process could ever be mastered but nevertheless it’s pretty heady stuff.

I got to thinking about the possibilities. What would we want to warn people about in the past? Tragedies like the holocaust would certainly be high on anyone’s list of “things that need warnings,” as well any number of natural disasters, terrorist attacks, preventable diseases and the like. How many lives would have been saved if penicillin was discovered a thousand years earlier?

Two obvious issues then crop up. First, would anyone listen? This would seem easy enough to test. If those sending the messages still occupied a world where no one stopped Mussolini they might start adding in messages like “oh, by the way, the Yankees beat the Giants in the next two world series.” Instant credibility, though once the news is public does it ruin the result?

The other question is whether the hypothetical folk of the future ought to warn us of such things. There is the idea that, if God is all-powerful and supremely good, we must be living in the best of all possible worlds. Any less evil would violate humanity’s free will and lessen the wonder of, or potential for real good in, this existence. This is a tremendously unsatisfying position. Saving one more life from a deadly disease would negate even more good in the world? Please. One of my patients last fall came in to the hospital expecting to deliver a baby and left planning a funeral for a child she never met. All she wanted to know was why God, if he never intended her boy to live, couldn’t have just given her a miscarriage three months earlier. Would that not have been a sufficiently painful lesson? Why now, at the last possible moment? Some questions have no answers.

At what point would communication with the past begin to destroy life as we experience it? What becomes worthy of changing? Ignoring quandaries about changing the timeline, how would we decide where to draw the line? You start off trying to halt World War III, then decide to add in a little lesson about the environmental causes of autism. Then you warn about a hurricane. Then a tornado. Then the thunderstorm that just knocks out the power in a couple of counties in Illinois one night because, really, why not? That blackout was really inconvenient, so why not prevent it?

Regardless of what the Higgs singlet does or does not open up in the future I wonder about responsibilities that go beyond the “natural” capacities of human beings. I suppose each new technological leap occasions such wonderings but this one seems to go beyond any previous examples I can think of. If such a power were at our disposal could we ethically not use it? It’s a strange and new and frightening and wonderful world we are discovering. Let’s hope we’re worthy of it.