PRECOGNITION 283
All this may sound like idle speculation that is not testable. But the
theory of the false vacuum will get its first experimental test, starting
in 2008, when the Large Hadron Collider is turned on outside Geneva,
Switzerland. One of the key purposes of the LHC is to find the "Higgs
boson," the last particle in the Standard Model, the one that has yet to
be found. It is the last piece of this jigsaw puzzle. (The Higgs particle
is so important but elusive that Nobel laureate Leon Lederman called
it "The God Particle.")
The Higgs boson, physicists believe, originally started out as a
tachyon. In the false vacuum, none of the subatomic particles had any
mass. But its presence destabilized the vacuum, and the universe
made a transition to a new vacuum, in which the Higgs boson turned
into an ordinary particle. After the transition from a tachyon to an ordinary particle, the subatomic particles begin to have the masses that
we measure in the laboratory today. Thus the discovery of the Higgs
boson will not only complete the last missing piece of the Standard
Model, it will also verify that the tachyon state once existed but has
been transformed into an ordinary particle.
In summary, precognition is ruled out by Newtonian physics. The
iron rule of cause and effect is never violated. In the quantum theory,
new states of matter are possible, such as antimatter, which corresponds to matter going backward in time, but causality is not violated.
In fact, in a quantum theory, antimatter is essential to restoring causality. Tachyons at first seem to violate causality, but physicists believe
that their true purpose was to set off the big bang and hence they are
not observable anymore.
Therefore precognition seems to be ruled out, at least for the foreseeable future, making it a Class III impossibility. It would set off a major shake-up in the very foundations of modern physics if precognition
was ever proved in reproducible experiments.
All this may sound like idle speculation that is not testable. But the
theory of the false vacuum will get its first experimental test, starting
in 2008, when the Large Hadron Collider is turned on outside Geneva,
Switzerland. One of the key purposes of the LHC is to find the "Higgs
boson," the last particle in the Standard Model, the one that has yet to
be found. It is the last piece of this jigsaw puzzle. (The Higgs particle
is so important but elusive that Nobel laureate Leon Lederman called
it "The God Particle.")
The Higgs boson, physicists believe, originally started out as a
tachyon. In the false vacuum, none of the subatomic particles had any
mass. But its presence destabilized the vacuum, and the universe
made a transition to a new vacuum, in which the Higgs boson turned
into an ordinary particle. After the transition from a tachyon to an ordinary particle, the subatomic particles begin to have the masses that
we measure in the laboratory today. Thus the discovery of the Higgs
boson will not only complete the last missing piece of the Standard
Model, it will also verify that the tachyon state once existed but has
been transformed into an ordinary particle.
In summary, precognition is ruled out by Newtonian physics. The
iron rule of cause and effect is never violated. In the quantum theory,
new states of matter are possible, such as antimatter, which corresponds to matter going backward in time, but causality is not violated.
In fact, in a quantum theory, antimatter is essential to restoring causality. Tachyons at first seem to violate causality, but physicists believe
that their true purpose was to set off the big bang and hence they are
not observable anymore.
Therefore precognition seems to be ruled out, at least for the foreseeable future, making it a Class III impossibility. It would set off a major shake-up in the very foundations of modern physics if precognition
was ever proved in reproducible experiments.