He agreed that skepticism would be in order. Nielsen called the incident a "funny thing that could make us to believe in the theory of ours." It was later that fall, of course, after the CERN collider was turned on, that a connection between two magnets vaporized, which shut down the collider for more than a year. Nielsen and Ninomiya started laying out their case for doom in the spring of 2008. The collider was built by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, to accelerate protons to energies of 7 trillion electron volts around an 18-mile underground racetrack and then crash them together into primordial fireballs.įor the record, as of the middle of September, CERN engineers hope to begin to collide protons at the so-called injection energy of 450 billion electron volts in December and then ramp up the energy until the protons have 3.5 trillion electron volts of energy apiece and then, after a short Christmas break, real physics can begin. This was some of the worst damage to the Large Hadron Collider. You might think that the appearance of this theory is further proof that people have had ample time-perhaps too much time-to think about what will come out of the collider, which has been 15 years and $9 billion in the making. 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 Nielsen calls it an "anti-miracle." In an unpublished essay, Nielson said of the theory, "Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God." It is their guess, he went on, "that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them." "It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck," Nielsen said in an e-mail message.
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Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, put this idea forward in a series of papers with titles like "Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal" and "Search for Future Influence From LHC," posted on the physics Web site in the last year and a half.Īccording to the so-called Standard Model that rules almost all physics, the Higgs is responsible for imbuing other elementary particles with mass. 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. No, I'm talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future.
I'm not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. 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.īefore year's end, 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.
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