Recently it has been announce that a smoking gun has been found for cosmic inflation but could it instead be the smoking[1] gun for a grand conspiracy, the mother of all conspiracies, the conspiracy theory to put all other conspiracy theories to shame? You may have your favourite conspiracy theory: the Roswell cover up, who shot JFK, the suppression of perpetual motion machines by the energy companies or the attempt by communication departments to take over the world. As a professor, once said: “Just because you are paranoid does not mean they are not out to get you.” (Followed closely by my second-best piece of advice, “Never trust a communications expert.”) But the conspiracy I am talking about is on a much larger scale, a cosmic scale, the conspiracy of all elementary particles in the universe to use their free will for the sole purpose of messing with the minds of humans and particularly that subclass of humans known as particle physicists[2]. The professor was right to be paranoid.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all particles are created equal and endowed by their Creator with free will. Surely you do not question that elementary particles have free will. Consider the muon. It decays at a time if its own choosing. There is no rule that says when a given muon will decay. It is decided by the muon in its own stubborn way. But you still claim that only humans have freewill. Why? Could it not be just of part the grand conspiracy of elementary particle to give humans the illusion of freewill? Besides we all know politicians do not have freewill. They just do, as a Pavlovian reflex, what they think will get them the most votes. Hence the mess the world is in. But I digress.
To explore further: what criteria is there to decide if a given object has freewill? Is it just unpredictability? If so, then Vancouver weather has freewill. We have already decided that politicians do not have freewill. But what about dogs? Are all their reactions Pavlovian conditioning? Most certainly not. Hence they are better candidates to have freewill than politicians. And what about cats? Cats certainly have will but it is free? Does the fact cats cannot be herded indicate they have freewill? And cows, do cows have freewill? Does the fact they can be herded indicate they do not have freewill? Or that plant on my window sill beckoning to be watered? Does it cause its leaves to droop out of the exercise of its own freewill just to annoy me? Possibly (there it goes again). It seems to me the hallmark of freewill is precisely that combination of random and non-random behaviour found in elementary particles and not in politicians. Hence another interpretations of quantum uncertainty, it is just elementary particles exercising their freewill.
You may be surprised that I claimed all particles are created equal. Surely the neutrino and electron have different properties and are not equal. But that is just them exercising their freewill. Those particles we call electrons have decided (note the verb decided) to behave as if they had a given set of interactions while the neutrinos have decided to be behave like they have a different set of interactions. The interactions, themselves, are illusionary created by the particles exercising their freewill. There was probably a grand council meeting at the beginning of time where the grand conspiracy was initiated and the roles assigned to different sets of particles. Indeed, it may have been that grand council meeting that started time itself.
The freewill of particles also explains the problem of evil. From earthquakes to global warming[3], the evil consequences are due to particle exercising their freewill. This type of evil could only be eliminated by denying particles freewill–an even greater evil.
Now back to the initial observation about the polarization of photons in the cosmic microwave background. Surely that polarization is not due to gravitational waves but due to photons exercising their freewill to mislead humans. Is it not more reasonable to assume that the measured polarization[4] is due to freewill than to some far distant interaction with gravitons? (Do gravitons even exits? They have never been directly observed.)
This conspiracy theory–just like all conspiracy theories–accounts for all the known facts and cannot be disproved. It therefore must be correct and we have shown conclusively that it is particles, not people, that have freewill and the photons are trying to mess with our minds[5].
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[1] And no, I have not been smoking with the mayor of certain large Canadian city.
[2] Nuclear physicists have always known that something was messing with the minds of particle physicists.
[3] Global warming is due to particles excising their freewill not carbon dioxide emissions.
[4] But beware the Jennings principle: Most exciting new results are wrong.
[5] This is not the perfect particle physics blog because it does not mention the Higgs boson, the LHC or super symmetry. Oops, maybe now it is.