21 October 2009

Is the Large Hadron Collider sabotaging itself? - from the future?

The LHC has been plagued by breakdowns. A new theory - offered by serious scientists - proposes that these are not random events, but rather than some event in the future is coming back to stop the LHC's progress:






  1. But if it's preventing itself from ever having been created in the first place ...

  2. Maybe that's what happens when you hire the lowest bidder to build your collider. Live and learn.

  3. Proposed by serious scientists, but proposed seriously?

  4. You could use the same excuse for anything. As far as I know, that guy hasn't published or shown anything regarding his idea.

    Maybe the reason I can't get a 100 in biochemistry is because 100s in biochemistry are so abhorrent to nature that any time I do it, its effects ripple backwards through time and make me have a bad night's sleep the night before every exam.

  5. The paper hasn't been published in a journal; it was submitted to a rapid-dissemination-archive Web site. Here's the abstract:


    Links to subsequent versions of the paper are found under "Submission history."

    (Note that the first version predicting trouble with the LHC appeared in 2007.)

    According to the site:


    In other words, it's respectable. This kind of electronic publishing is the latest thing in cutting-edge fields of science. The normal publishing process takes too long and is too selective; it inhibits dissemination of ideas to the scientific community.

    I've been fascinated by this story since it first hit the mainstream media. There's a fascinating post about it on Discover's Cosmic Variance blog:


    The writer of the post points out that Nielsen isn't proposing that his idea is the way things really work; rather, he's taken a novel idea and worked out the logical implications in a scientific manner. It's an exercise, in other words.

  6. "So the feminists and pagans are right: God *is* a woman. Named Higgs. Who doesn't fancy us staring at her boson." said a commenter on that thread.

    brilliant! :D

  7. Self-canceling paradox. If it were a future civilization returning to successfully destroy it, then there'd be no reason to return from the future to destroy it.

  8. They aren't suggesting a future civilization travels back in time to stop it. They're suggesting nature itself does it--can't help doing it, in fact.

  9. Anonymous-

    The key there is SUCCESSFULLY destroying it. What if they failed and these are last-ditch efforts?


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