Hypothetically, the project (which is perhaps the largest scientific project in human history) could produce the Higgs boson, a (hypothetical) super-tiny particle which (theoretically) imbues all atoms with what we call "mass." The project has several astronomy-related implications, namely that when operated at full force, the LHC could reproduce the conditions present immediately after the Big Bang in which Higgs bosons roamed the cosmos freely before atoms quickly wrangled them and made them their own for all of eternity...until now?
Anyfart, the New York Times ran a great piece this week about a couple of physicists who think that the LHC has so much potential that its numerous breakdowns as of late may be attributed to the fact that the machine is being sabotaged by its own future. Thankfully, the journalist, Dennis Overbye, approaches these claims skeptically and points out that the theory is not widely accepted by any stretch, though we should still lend it an ear:
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.
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Sure, it’s crazy, and CERN should not and is not about to mortgage its investment to a coin toss. The theory was greeted on some blogs with comparisons to Harry Potter. But craziness has a fine history in a physics that talks routinely about cats being dead and alive at the same time and about anti-gravity puffing out the universe.
As Niels Bohr, Dr. Nielsen’s late countryman and one of the founders of quantum theory, once told a colleague: “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”
Wow... this sounds like something out of a sci-fi novel. Blows my mind.
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