Could the Large Hadron Collider be held back by its own future? (13 Oct 2009)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/...own-future.html
The much-delayed and maligned Large Hadron Collider has been hit by its most outlandish claim to date - it is being sabotaged by its own future. -- Forget the far-fetched belief that it will create a black hole, two distinguished physicists have gone even further claiming nature itself is stopping the troubled £4.4billion project from getting off the ground.In a theory reminiscent of the time travelling film Back to the Future, the theoretical physicists Holger Nielsen, from Denmark, and Masao Ninomiya, from Japan, have concluded that its discoveries could be so "abhorrent to nature" that they are coming back to stop their own creation.They have outlined their thoughts 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." The pair's hypothesis centres around the Higgs Boson, a mysterious tiny particle and building block of life that it is hoped the LHC will discover. They have come up with a theory that it will "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. "It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck," Dr. Nielsen said. He said that his theories may even provide a "model for God" who "rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them". The world's biggest and most complex experiment to date, the LHC has taken 10,000 researchers more than 15 years to build. Eventually it is hoped that by firing particles around a 17-mile underground tunnel near Geneva, it can recreate conditions that existed fractions of a second after the Big Bang. At the same scientists hope to locate a mysterious particle known as the Higgs Boson or God Particle which gives everything its mass. But the whole project has been beset by controversy and technical failures.First scientists claimed it would create a black hole that would devour the world and then in September 2008 circuits in one of the magnets overheated causing damage and leading to a helium leak. Now just as it is about to be switched on again, the theoretical physicists have thrown time travel into the mix.