Who Is Sabotaging the LHC?
“For those of us who believe in physics, this separation between past, present and future is only an illusion.” –Albert Einstein
Perhaps you’ve heard of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC for short): the world’s largest, most advanced particle accelerator, a circular underground tunnel that stretches about 17 miles in diameter. Located on the border of France and Switzerland, the collider is operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (also known as CERN) and took over 15 years and $9 billion to build. Its purpose, to quote a recent New York Times article, is “to accelerate protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts around an 18-mile underground racetrack and then crash them together into primordial fireballs.” Researchers hope these experiments will help them re-create the Big Bang, providing crucial clues to the origin of the universe.
The LHC and its components were immortalized last summer in the following rap song, created by a CERN employee:
Since its unveiling in September 2008, however, the LHC has been plagued with technical problems that continue to impede its progress. The most recent occurred last week when a rogue bird dropped part of a baguette into the machine (seriously).
This sequence of unfortunate events has led a few physicists to speculate that someone might be sabotaging the LHC – specifically, someone from . . . the future. How could this be possible outside of a science fiction movie, you may ask? Says the NYT, “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.”
What do you think: is it possible that the LHC is being sabotaged from the future, or have some physicists really gone off the deep end?
Tags: Nuclear
