Secret Meat

They turned the CERN particle-collider back on this week. I notice we are still here; no black hole chain reactions or gray-goo scenarios, or anything like that. However, this sort of speculation floating around in the highest theoretical circles that the universe might be bending back on itself to prevent our recreation, even in the most miniature, of early primal big-bang energy conditions is pretty interesting, if not alarming...

"Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, have published several papers over the past year arguing that the CERN experiment may be the latest in a series of physics research projects whose purposes are so unacceptable to the universe that they are doomed to fail, subverted by the future."

That they have been pondering such things since before these first interferences is notable. That the undertaking of building a collider to find the Higgs-Boson has been harried by misfortune and error since it's inception is also remarkable, if only in retrospect.

"In 1993, the multibillion-dollar United States Superconducting Supercollider, which was designed to search for the Higgs, was abruptly canceled by Congress. In 2000, scientists at a previous CERN accelerator, LEP, said they were on the verge of discovering the particle when, again, funding dried up. And now there's the LHC. Originally scheduled to start operating in 2006, it has been hit with a series of delays and setbacks, including a sudden explosion between two magnets nine days after the accelerator was first turned on, the arrest of one of its contributing physicists on suspicion of terrorist activity and, most recently, the aerial bread bombardment from a bird...In a series of audacious papers, Nielsen and Ninomiya have suggested that setbacks to the LHC occur because of "reverse chronological causation," which is to say, sabotage from the future. The papers suggest that the Higgs boson may be "abhorrent to nature" and the LHC's creation of the Higgs sometime in the future sends ripples backward through time to scupper its own creation. Each time scientists are on the verge of capturing the Higgs, the theory holds, the future intercedes. The theory as to why the universe rejects the creation of Higgs bosons is based on complex mathematics, but, Nielsen tells TIME, "you could explain it [simply] by saying that God, in inverted commas, or nature, hates the Higgs and tries to avoid them."

Future Echoes? Coincidence? Human error? Or just the intellectual acrobatics these fellas will go to trying to make a preexisting model of the universe work rather than scrap it and admit total ignorance, especially considering what their own conclusions say about how Time itself works.