Cuppacafe

An item that is yet to be created may have been created in the future and then traveled back in time to prevent it being created.

Yeah, let that thought roll around on your brain pan for a moment or two...

It seems that the Large Hadron Collider located in an underground race track near Geneva Switzerland can't seem to get started up without breaking down. Almost like it's jinxed. Lots of expensive problems and accidents happened about the same time that the thing started up for the first time, and ever since.

There's an essay in the New York Times called

The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate

in it, the guy talks 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.

Yeah, sounds a bit on the superstitious side of science fiction, I know.

CERN, who built the collider, is probably responsible for more of the internet than even Al Gore, if that's possible. So, most of the people surrounding the collider project are very geeky -- but you can see, being geeky and all scientific like doesn't keep you from starting to sound... well, a bit like Doctor Who:

(15 sec, sound req'd)

more from the article:

According to the so-called Standard Model that rules almost all physics, the Higgs is responsible for imbuing other elementary particles with mass.

“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail message. In an unpublished essay, Dr. 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.”

The fun part about this theory is that it was posited about six months before the real run of bad luck on the collider project started happening.

Yes, they predicted the bad luck, based on the belief that the particle can cause time ripples so to prevent it's discovery.

Almost like they themselves were from the future...

I don't know about you, but I have my tinfoil hat shiny side out tonight!

“For those of us who believe in physics,” Einstein once wrote to a friend, “this separation between past, present and future is only an illusion.”

Can the future really influence the past?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 at 10:07 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.