Could the CERN Large Hadron Collider's Search for the Higgs Boson Be Too Damn Successful?

Is it possible that the Large Hadron Collider, which has been subject to technological fits and starts since its initial launch last year, and which is poised to be refired up again at the end of this year, is a resounding success although (fortunately, for now at least) we will never know it?

The NY Times reported that a pair of distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson (aka "The G-d Particle"), 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. Ain't it cool?

As the NY Times reports, "According to the so-called Standard Model that rules almost all physics, the Higgs is responsible for imbuing other elementary particles with mass.

“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail message. In an unpublished essay, Dr. Nielsen said of the theory, “Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.” It is their guess, he went on, “that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”

This malign influence from the future, they argue, could explain why the United States Superconducting Supercollider, also designed to find the Higgs, was canceled in 1993 after billions of dollars had already been spent, an event so unlikely that Dr. Nielsen calls it an “anti-miracle.”

The full NY Times essay by Dennis Overbye [link here]

"Search for Effect for Influence from the Future of Large Hadron Collider" by Holger G. Neilsen and Masao Ninomiya [link here]

Given the overwhelming nature of Planet Earth and the follies, foibles, and distractions of humans who dwell on it at the moment, could this concept truly be labeled "crazy"? In the words of physicist Niels Bohr to a colleague in a discussion of quantam physics, “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.”