Posted on 10/13/2009 1:13:12 AM PDT by LibWhacker
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I think the guy sounds like a quack with this theory.
Maybe he's just trying to get a grant. We'll know in a decade or three.
I’m a believer. My Little Killer cat reminds me of her reality every time she ambushes me. It seems to be her hobby.
One problem with this idea is that some ultra-high energy proton collisions in the upper atmosphere far exceed what might be eventually attained by this terrestrial collider. It’s too bad we can’t somehow contain and analyze some of these collisions. Then we wouldn’t even have to build this machine.
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