It Would be Totally Useless if it Existed at All

In another entry in was has turned into a semi regular series on the wacky hijinks got up to by the Hadron Supercollider and its staff I have exciting news. Time travel is just around the corner. Or, to be more exact, hypothetical time travel is just around a hypothetical corner if a hypothetical particle called the Higgs singlet behaves the way scientists expect it to always assuming the particle exists at all and we can make it. One can't help think certain scientists have a new career in political speech writing waiting for them if they ever get tired of chasing non existent sub atomic particles down twenty seven kilometres of tunnels.

Apparently the Higgs singlet (it's like the Higgs boson only different) may (or may not) be able to jump out of the point in time and space it currently occupies and reappear at a different point in time and space, possibly. It is further hypothesised that if scientists can control the production of Higgs singlets (so far they haven't managed to make one) they might be able to use them to send messages to either the past or the future. They could probably also send them to right now but that wouldn't justify the size of the research grants.

I'm not particularly impressed with the concept of sending messages to the future. I can do that myself. In fact anybody can. Since we have not yet got transmission time for messages down to zero any message sent arrives in the future at least relative to when it was sent. I can do that without a Higgs singlet, Higgs mitten or even a Higgs slutty red stiletto (you just knew a clothing joke had to come somewhere). What I'm doing with Mr Higgs' slutty red stilettos is none of your business.

Sending messages to the past is a little more impressive I admit. I personally am writing this entire blog entry solely because a letter turned up from myself three months into the future telling me that writing it was the only way to avoid being torn apart by an octopus. To avoid tentaclely doom I decided to get writing.

Although technically impressive sending messages to the past is likely to be an exercise in futility anyway. Either the recipients ignored our advice in which case they're idiots or they took it in which case we're idiots. Frankly I fail to see the point of any time travelling message longer than "Sorry!"

I wonder if the brains trust coming up with these heady ideas of time travelling junk mail have stopped to consider that even if we do succeed in sending messages to the past they're not going to be able to read them. People in the past don't even know what a Higgs singlet is (I'm not entirely clear myself), they certainly don't know how to detect one if it did turn up. If we do discover a way of sending messages through time the very first thing we're going to get is an announcement saying "you have nine hundred million new messages". Then we will have to go through the weary process of deleting all the ones that were for anybody further back in time than ourselves while wonder why our future selves talked so damned much; and most of it is going to be spam anyway.

At some point we are going to have to stop inventing better means of communication and give some time to think of something worth communicating. But then who am I to talk?