The LHC, the Higgs Boson, and Fate

Reader Maximum Prophet sends a piece from the NY Times by the usually reliable Dennis Overbye reporting on a "crazy" theory being worked up by a pair of "otherwise distinguished physicists": that the Large Hadron Collider's difficulties may be due to the universe's reluctance to produce a Higgs boson. Maximum Prophet adds, "This happened to the Superconducting Super Collider in the science fiction story Einstein's Bridge. Now Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, are theorizing that it's happening in real life." "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."

Comments

That's Groovy

[Philip K Dickhead]

I think casting Keanu Reeves as Neils Bohr was a stroke of unmatched brilliance.

Lady GaGa is, of course, a surprise as "the loathsome particle". She does a good Burlesconi imitation, all thing considered...

Perfect...

[neurogeneticist]

So I can tell my wife that I cannot cook dinner tonight because the result would be so abhorrent that nature might send an agent back in time to destroy me before I can create it. Ergo, any movement toward making dinner could very well result in my demise...so let that be on her conscience.

Re:Perfect...

[StikyPad]

You can tell her, but she'll probably stop listening after "because," at which point she'll begin recalling everything you've ever done wrong, and start reeling them off in a run on sentence not unlike this one, taking the collective, including your most recent attempt to get out of making dinner, to mean that you don't love her, which raises the question of why you're even together, except that you obviously just want your needs satisfied while she does EVERYTHING, and you don't even care.

Either that or she'll just start making dinner without saying anything, in which case you're in *real* trouble. If so, DO NOT EAT THE FOOD, because it's probably poisoned, but also don't let her know that you're not eating the food, because it will only be taken as an insult to her cooking and further enrage her.

To say...

[smooth wombat]

that the Higgs boson is abhorrent to Nature is ridiculous.

Please don't anthropomorphize particles. They don't like when you do that.

Re:Einstein's Bridge

[MiniMike]

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, leave something like that to Hollywood. In the movie version, the LHC would travel back in time to kill its grandfather, but would miss instead killing the Tevatron. Hilarious shenanigans
or a car chase (probably both) would ensue.

Please just leave it as a book, if you like it.

Schrodinger's Cookies

[Tablizer]

I'm talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future.

As proof of this, the NY-Times article can only be read by some observers but not others.
       

Re:This theory is not to be taken seriously

[need4mospd]

Wizards.