Essay – The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate – NYTimes.com

by Melanie on 13/10/09 at 9:43 pm

The Higgs boson can’t exist, so when we create it, time boomerangs backwards to undo the misdeed. Yikes! Dennis Overbye of the New York Times writes a dazzling piece:

“More than a year after an explosion of sparks, soot and frigid helium shut it down, the world’s biggest and most expensive physics experiment, known as the Large Hadron Collider, is poised to start up again. In December, if all goes well, protons will start smashing together in an underground racetrack outside Geneva in a search for forces and particles that reigned during the first trillionth of a second of the Big Bang.

Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No, I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.”

via Essay – The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate – NYTimes.com.