The cover story in last week’s New Scientist asks, “2008: Does time travel start here?”

As you may have heard, this will be the year. The Large Hadron Collider – the most powerful atom-smasher ever built – will be switched on, and particle physics will hit pay-dirt. Yet if a pair of Russian mathematicians are right, any advances in this area could be overshadowed by a truly extraordinary event. According to Irina Aref’eva and Igor Volovich, the LHC might just turn out to be the world’s first time machine.

Not surprisingly, the story quickly made its way to the news media. With such an exciting premise, not unlike the previous hysteria over micro black holes destroying the world, how could it not?

Unfortunately, these theories (hypotheses? conjectures? possibilities?) are more provocative than probable. Scientists accidentally creating a time machine? Or causing a reaction that devours the planet? Though backed by solid math, such scenarios are more the stuff of science fiction. And they frequently illuminate the media’s (and scientist’s) willingness to draw special attention to less significant science in the name of interest and readership.

Thankfully, New Scientist included in the same issue a commentary on the whole matter: Is Big Physics peddling science pornography?

Scientists, and people like me who stick up for science, are happy to pour scorn on astrologers, homeopaths, UFO-nutters, crop-circlers and indeed the Adam-and-Eve brigade, who all happily believe in six impossible things before breakfast with no evidence at all. Show us the data, we say to these deluded souls. Where are your trials? What about Occam’s razor – the principle that any explanation should be as simple as possible? The garden is surely beautiful enough, we say, without having to populate it with fairies.

The danger is that on the wilder shores of physics these standards are often not met either. There is as yet no observational evidence for cosmic strings. It’s hard to test for a multiverse. In this sense, some of these ideas are not so far, conceptually, from UFOs and homeopathy. If we are prepared to dismiss ghosts, say, as ludicrous on the grounds that firstly we have no proper observational evidence for them and secondly that their existence would force us to rethink everything, doesn’t the same argument apply to simulated universes and time machines? Are we not guilty of prejudice against some kinds of very unlikely ideas in favour of others?

Believing in ghosts takes a different mindset to advocating parallel worlds or cosmic strings. But do we really believe that we are all the creations of a computer sitting in some higher-dimensional adolescent’s bedroom, or that time travellers will land at the LHC? Or are we, too, seeing fairies at the bottom of the garden?

Basically, physics has reached a point where a lot of data is wildly divergent from what is well understood, and the theories invented to explain the data are often entirely unintuitive. Even old-hat theories like the Big Bang and inflation are extremely different than the world we are used to, and probably seemed unlikely when they were devised. But they are backed by hard data, and have allowed for some beautiful predictions. Mathematical credulity aside, where are the discussions of the probability and practicality of today’s sexy science?

This all reminds me of the (surprisingly mainstream) coverage of Boltzmann’s Brains. In explaining the silly idea in The New York Times, Dennis Overbye casually mentions this point:

Nobody in the field believes that this is the way things really work, however.

And as Sean of Cosmic Variance says:

The point about Boltzmann’s Brains is not that they are a fascinating prediction of an exciting new picture of the multiverse. On the contrary, the point is that they constitute a reductio ad absurdum that is meant to show the silliness of a certain kind of cosmology.

Or to put it another way, “It’s kind of an old-fashioned argument. Take a theory, use it to make a prediction, the prediction isn’t correct, and therefore the theory has been falsified!”

I appreciate Overbye mentioning that Boltzmann’s Brains are not believed to be how things really are, even if it was mentioned only in passing at the beginning. Many of the other ideas that make their rounds through the mainstream media are similarly insubstantial to most people in the field, and reporters should do more to make this point obvious. Sure, maybe the LHC will create a miniature black hole that destroys the world, but is the 0.0000000001% chance worthy of coverage?

Isn’t the real science titillating enough on its own?

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