Sabotage on the Large Hadron Collider?

By at 12:53 pm Friday, Oct 16

Sabotage...from the future?

That's the theory being put forward by two top physicists. Even they admit it's a little weird. The idea could be groundbreaking. Or, it could be a valuable lesson that even scientists can fall prey to the very human tendency to see patterns in actually random events.

Some people have this experience and come away believing in astrology. Instead, Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, have ended up with the theory that the Future is trying to stop us from creating a Higgs boson particle.

This malign influence from the future, they argue, could explain why the United States Superconducting Supercollider, also designed to find the Higgs, was canceled in 1993 after billions of dollars had already been spent, an event so unlikely that Dr. Nielsen calls it an "anti-miracle."
...While it is a paradox to go back in time and kill your grandfather, physicists agree there is no paradox if you go back in time and save him from being hit by a bus. In the case of the Higgs and the collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus. Although just why the Higgs would be a catastrophe is not clear. If we knew, presumably, we wouldn't be trying to make one.

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Maggie Koerth-Baker

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