On 8 March 2011, Dr. Thomas Weiler and graduate fellow Chiu Man Ho of Vanderbilt put a paper on another possibility of achieving a sort of time travel. This apparently got a good deal of press at the time, as both CBS and UPI actually picked up the story and ran with it.
Why do I mention this? It is most certainly not because I have a dream or hope of time travel - quite the opposite really. In the past, I have talked of how surprised I was at the lack of hype coming out of the LHC. The last terrible bit I heard was a sort of rogue media assault on the possibility of the LHC creating a black hole and thereby destroying everything! But that was years ago and not stirred up by the high energy physics community. 1 1As an aside, it did provide the very comical http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/, which includes a very simple answer and funny source code. By the way, no - as far as we can tell, it hasn't yet destroyed the world.
Let's get clear - I don't think that hype is bad. Dr. Weiler himself noted the speculative interest in this idea and that it's perhaps not the most likely theory. And it doesn't contradict M-Theory, apparently. I know nothing of this, so I can't comment. But I can say that such fanciful papers are wonderful. This sort of free form play is liberating, and exactly the same sort of thing that drew me into science. What can we say about the world around us that goes along with what we know? Whether it's correct or not is something that can be explored, but it's just an idea.
For those who don't want to read the article, Dr. Weiler and Chiu Man Ho allude to the possibility of transferring Higgs singlets (a relative to the as-yet-only-hypothesized Higgs Boson) to a previous time. So no, unfortunately we cannot yet fix the problems of our past.
Nonetheless, there should be more hype about the LHC. The test schedule on the collider is becoming more intense all the time. Very exciting.
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