Tales of the Incredible Hoke Robertson

Every time I am reading the Journal of American Physics on a hot summer day I am reminded of the time I was a consultant to the international physics consortium the European Organization for Nuclear Research which built the LHC, or Large Hadron Collider with which I know everyone is familiar.

The operators were having some problems getting the magnetic fields which guide and accelerate the various subatomic particles to align, which of course meant that the collider was not colliding. I was called in to help. The problem turned out to be a simple programming glitch; some MIT professor had inexcusably confused the neutrino flavor of the muon with that of the tau, which of course meant that the location of the particles would be in different spots under quantum physics. Anyway, when I eventually found the error it was quickly corrected.

However, before we discovered that simple error, the operators were so eager to do their first real collision that we experimented on getting the particles to collide without the use of the complex computer calculations. One of my previous peer-reviewed papers had speculated how sound waves could affect subatomic particle probabilities, and so we proceeded to try to find just the right sounds to align the neutrinos as they raced around the 27 kilometer (17 miles) track of the collider. I calculated that humming the first three notes of the song "Yesterday" by the Beatles into the magnetic field should slightly bend the time-space brane in which we exist, just enough to correct the gap between the non-colliding particles. Although this worked as anticipated, the collision angle resulted in the neutrinos producing tachyons instead of quarks. The fine stream of tachyons of course threw us back in time exactly one day which was a bit un-nerving but did let us finish our work ahead of schedule and under budget. Anyway, I found that being thrown back in time resulted in quite a sunburn, which is why hot summer days jog this memory. Of course the California Lotto was extremely interested in this time travel thing, but that is another story. HOKE ROBERTSON