Start the Large Hadron Collider?

Yes or No by Random Card Draw

In a recent New York Times article, a theoretical High Energy Physicist was quoted as saying, "It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck." The basic idea seems to be that the universe "discourages/sabotages" the production of Higgs particles by making highly unlikely events occur in order to prevent such a collider from producing them in the first place---a sort of rewriting of history from the future. In order to test this prediction, it has been suggested that a random card be drawn from a deck of 100,000,000 cards in which 99,999,999 are "yes" cards (Ok, to start the LHC) and 1 is a "no" card (Don't start the LHC). Although we don't pretend to have any authority to control whether or not the LHC is started, we thought that it would be interesting to run the experiment on the web and collect statistics. If the number of No cards significantly exceeds (say, by at least a factor of 10) the expected number, then we will do our best to inform the appropriate scientists at CERN that the future universe is trying to send us a message.

99,999,999 Ladies
Yes! Cards 		       1 Ace of Spades
No! Card
      
   

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Page last modified October 17, 2009
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