Back in September, 2008, when the Large Hadron Collider, the super-duper atom smasher outside Geneva (near the airport, as you can see in the photo; about three miles, in fact, from where I once lived in total ignorance of Hadron Colliders and their ilk), was about to go online and start hurling particles of stuff around in an attempt to replicate post-Big Bang conditions, or something, and thereby reveal the existence of the Higgs Boson, a really tiny particle that theoretically should exist but that no one's ever seen (or something), some scientists warned that all this hubris would result in a black hole that would swallow us up. They weren't joking; read this
New York Times piece. Pretty scary stuff, if you have nothing else to worry about. These scientific Cassandras calmed down when the Large Hadron Collider, upon starting up, promptly broke down; but now that it's on schedule to fire up again, warnings are being voiced on a different subject. According to the
Daily Telegraph, my favorite source of news of the weird, a pair of distinguished physicists, Holger Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya, say that the LHC's ongoing woes are the result of sabotage from the future. "'It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,' Dr. Nielsen said. He said that his theories may even provide a 'model for God' who "rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them,'" So much so that He sends emissaries into the past to destroy the machine that might discover said Higgs thingamajigs. I dunno. It's beginning to make my brain hurt. Might make a good movie, though. (Oh, that's right: it already did.)
This just in: Get Nielsen and Ninomiya on the blower. The Large Hadron Collider has been damaged by a baguette dropped by a
bird.
