Back to the Future… in the Present?

Does anyone remember the Large Hadron Collider? Yeah, me neither. All I remember is that it was big, it was going to create black holes which would suck the Earth into another dimension and that it broke after its first run.

Only two of these things are true, by the way.

So apparently, the LHC is all fixed up and ready to go again in December. Good, right? I mean, I always wanted to know what my evil twin looked like (she’s probably way hotter than me- all evil twins are). Will sent me an NYT article on its restoration and… I think my brain just broke reading it.

In this article by Dennis Overbye, he writes:

“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.”

I’m not a physicist but I read that to mean that scientists believe that the experiment they want to conduct is sabotaging their chances of conducting the experiment in the first place. Or that the results of an experiment in the future is sabotaging their current trials now.

Dr. Holger Bech Nielsen, who’s quoted in the article along with a Dr.Masao Ninomiya, states: “It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck.” They also blame the somewhat turbulent (could it be JINXED?!) past of the LHC on the Higgs boson. Uh, what's wrong with chalking things up to being a coincidence? I mean, things happen and sometimes the timing of certain events is eerie but... seriously? You might as well blame your last bad haircut (the one that just so happened to take place a day before a blind date) on the LHC too. "It's trying to sabotage my date!"

That’s my simplified version of the article and their claims. Science, especially physics, is full of weird, crazy theories that on the surface, sounds…. well, crazy. You dig a little deeper and it almost makes sense. I mean, did you hear the thing about the strings and eleven dimensions? Or that story about the undead cat in a box?

Anyway, read the article and have your mind explode- or laugh your ass off, whatever.

In the meantime, I’ll be outside waiting for the DeLorean DMC-12 to pick me up so I can save my mom from marrying Marty or Biff…

Comments

[Emil]

I hate the "L" stands for Large... really? A bunch of scientists and they couldn't think of something besides large? What about some impressive latin word or at least something "G" for Ginormous or Gargantuan. bah!