>From the NY Times: October 13, 2009
The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate By DENNIS OVERBYE 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.... You might think that the appearance of this theory is further proof that people have had ample time perhaps too much time to think about what will come out of the collider, which has been 15 years and $9 billion in the making.... For the record, as of the middle of September, CERN engineers hope to begin to collide protons at the so- called injection energy of 450 billion electron volts in December and then ramp up the energy until the protons have 3.5 trillion electron volts of energy apiece and then, after a short Christmas break, real physics can begin. Maybe.... Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/science/space/13lhc.html?hpw http://tinyurl.com/yzadjbx
