Large Hadron Collider sabotaged by time travel?

LHC - is the future giving it a good kicking?
LHC - is the future giving it a good kicking?

An interesting theory has been revealed which may point to the reasons so much is going wrong with the Large Hadron Collider, and it revolves around time travel.

The New York Times has unearthed an article by physicists Holger Bech Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya that pose a number of 'timeless' questions surrounding the LHC.

The essay is titled 'Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal' – although we would have called it 'Run for it Marty: Doc Brown was right' – and put forward the theory that bad luck will dog the launch of the LHC, with future influences stopping the Collider from doing its job.

Interestingly, these theories were announced before the calamitous string of incidents that have postponed the LHC from finding the hallowed Higgs boson particle.

Future shock

In the article it states: "Since LHC will produce particles of a mathematically new type of fundamental scalars, ie, the Higgs particles, there is potentially a chance to find unseen effects, such as on influence going from future to past, which we suggest in the present paper."

The pair then go on to explain the effects the LHC may have on the future by way of a card game.

Although this theory has been royally bashed in a number of science blogs, as the New York Times points out, the physicists believe it to be crazy too but: "While it is a paradox to go back in time and kill your grandfather, physicists agree there is no paradox if you go back in time and save him from being hit by a bus. In the case of the Higgs and the collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus."

Heady stuff, and while it might be total nonsense and not explain the reasons behind the LHC being broken, it does sound as if the physicists may well have cracked the barmy plot of Lost. And that can only be a good thing.

Via New York Times

Marc Chacksfield

Marc Chacksfield is the Editor In Chief, Shortlist.com at DC Thomson. He started out life as a movie writer for numerous (now defunct) magazines and soon found himself online - editing a gaggle of gadget sites, including TechRadar, Digital Camera World and Tom's Guide UK. At Shortlist you'll find him mostly writing about movies and tech, so no change there then.