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 Nielson said in an unpublished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.