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Now this is interesting...
It seems that there are a few physicists out there who are advancing a theory that the CERN supercollider will once again fail -- because it must. Y'see, the Higgs boson, which the supercollider is designed to eventually produce and study, "might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it [can] make one."
Talk about your time travel paradoxes...
The proponents of the theory, Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, argue that this may also be why, after billions of dollars spent in development, the US Superconducting Supercollider was scrapped in 1993 -- its own future reached back into the past and shut down the funding.
The CERN supercollider is scheduled to resume operations at the end of this year after its magnet meltdown back in 2008. So maybe we'll find out that this theory is wrong when CERN works flawlessly and begins to produce collisions and results. Or will it?
There must be an sf story in there somewhere. :-)
It seems that there are a few physicists out there who are advancing a theory that the CERN supercollider will once again fail -- because it must. Y'see, the Higgs boson, which the supercollider is designed to eventually produce and study, "might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it [can] make one."
Talk about your time travel paradoxes...
The proponents of the theory, Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, argue that this may also be why, after billions of dollars spent in development, the US Superconducting Supercollider was scrapped in 1993 -- its own future reached back into the past and shut down the funding.
The CERN supercollider is scheduled to resume operations at the end of this year after its magnet meltdown back in 2008. So maybe we'll find out that this theory is wrong when CERN works flawlessly and begins to produce collisions and results. Or will it?
There must be an sf story in there somewhere. :-)
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Nielsen and Ninomiya are disagreed with by other, equally respected, physicists. Shall we throw them all in a pit with knives and let them battle it out?
Further, it's pretty clear when you read their papers that they themselves don't really think the story is credible--they're having a little fun with the creative speculations that the mathematics imply. It's the NYTimes writer of the article who goes running with that notion for the sake of making the story interesting.
It's bad science reporting, not bad science. And it's still hilarious.
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