The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate

[Dave Monroe]

The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: October 12, 2009

More than a year after an explosion of sparks, soot and frigid helium
shut it down, the world’s biggest and most expensive physics
experiment, known as the Large Hadron Collider, is poised to start up
again. In December, if all goes well, protons will start smashing
together in an underground racetrack outside Geneva in a search for
forces and particles that reigned during the first trillionth of a
second of the Big Bang.

Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary
theories in science. I’m not talking about extra dimensions of
space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No,
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....

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/science/space/13lhc.html