Cern’s Large Hadron Collider is the closest thing the mainstream public is currently aware of that closely resembles a mad scientist’s laboratory and doomsday device all rolled up into one.  Ever since the Supercolliding Superconductor met its fate in 1993, the search for observable data about the Higg’s Boson has been met with a string of incredibly bizarre bad luck.  This bad luck has led some scientists to speculate that there may perhaps be a more dramatic explanation than just sheer chance.  Could the LHC be causing a paradox that ultimately affects itself to ensure it is never switched on successfully?

It sounds like something Chris Carter would think up, but the minds behind this are two highly respected scientists at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Yukawa institute for theoretical physics in Kyoto.  Bech Nielson  and Hasao Ninomiya have come to speculate that the Hadron Collider will cause such a disturbance in the universe that events will eventually ripple back in time to “undo” or “sabotage” such events.  The theory assumes a linear time system in which future events can effect the past as long as they do not create a paradox for the point of origin.

In other words, if you traveled back in time it would be paradoxical for you to kill your grandfather.  It would not, however, be paradoxical for you to save your grandfather’s life.  According to this theory, some compelling force of chance and/or nature would disallow you from creating a paradox.  "It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr. Nielson said in an unpublished essay in email circulation around the scientific community.

One may even be able to conclude that a future motivated to cancel its own existence would not only create “bad luck” in the Higgs device, but would rather render it forever inoperable through an infinite number of "jinxes."  Another question this raises is, if we are truly dealing with laws of physics, at what point does the threshold between “acceptable reality” and “unacceptable reality” get crossed, and why is it not at that point the “bad luck happens” rather than at a sort of scatter-shot throughout the time-line?

Another theory on the LHC’s string of bad luck is alien intervention.  If a device existed that could destroy the entire universe, yet a more advanced race had by chance developed before us, then wouldn’t they have discovered Boson particles as well?  Then wouldn’t they have, at an early stage in their development, attempted to create an atom smasher such as the LHC in an attempt to discover faster than light travel?  Indeed the LHC experiment may well be a requirement for acceptance into the greater universal community.  What alien race, then, saved our own benefactors?  And what saved them?  It appears the alien theory doesn’t coincide with the end of the universe theory.

So what, then, is the cause of the LHC’s bad luck?  In the early days of The Manhattan project it was assumed that there was a 99.99% chance that the weapon would not destroy the entire world on first detonation.  Those working on the project were generally either dedicated physicists and/or engineers driven by the innocent desire for discovery and a place in history.  The rest were compartmentalized and had no idea what they were working on, only that it was a weapon that would save the world and may help end the war.  The difference between The Manhattan Project and the massive CERN LHC is that everyone in the world knows about CERN.  If there is indeed a collective consciousness, a large portion of it is terrified by the prospect of Earth being swallowed by a black hole.  Is it possible that these apprehensions are holding back the completion of the project?  Perhaps they manifest even in workers and those funding the project.  Any small mishap could result in the project being shelved for months, even years.

Time travel or no, CERN represents possibly the most important step humanity will take for many years, and could either herald a new age of enlightenment thrusting us into the future if we learn the nature of the boson particle, or it could extinguish us forever.