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Comment by jonah | Hacker News Reader

I had no idea about Nielsen and Ninomiya's theories and multiple publications on them. I love the serious way their (I assume trolling) ideas are taken. Good fun in the high energy physics communy.

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Well, it can be linked to the more serious Everett's many-worlds explanation and quantum immortality ... we don't live in a world in which we successfully fired up the LHC and the black hole destroyed everyone on Earth, because in that world, there is no life on Earth. So we live in one of the other worlds in which, by whatever improbable means, the black hole never materialized.

Why is this not a serious topic?

See also the "Doomsday argument". It makes similar arguments in a different context without resorting to many worlds. Just the fact that we are alive at a certain time affects the probability that we are part of a doomsday scenario.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortalit...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument

Is that the one where tachyons are produced, travel back in time and ultimately interfere with their own creation? Fascinating stuff, although I struggle to believe it myself, I think that science's best ideas have historically come out of the blue - more attention to "the blue" is something that I would like to see more of from modern science.

Yes. And interestingly the GP's article spends a lot more time on that than the bird/bread. (Though that bird may have come back from the future as a saboteur[1].)

[1] Even though it doesn't have wooden shoes.

There's quite a few consequences, though - wrong as it might be. Regardless of how preposterous it is, imagine it to be true. What would that do to our concept of "science: the art of disproving falseness"? Science already struggles with the precision of components (telescopes, as an example) and, what's cognitively pleasing, is figuring out how you would devise an experiment for that. It doesn't matter if it was not true, how would you prove that? How do you say, for certain, that particles are not travelling back in time?

That's the wonder that science has seems to have lost.

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