God may have an inordinate fondness for beetles, but he rather hates Higgs particles. This spells trouble for the Large Hadron Collider. Some physicists suggest 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." The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate.
2 comments:
Interesting, a Physicists' occam's razor-choosing a time traveling Large Hadron Collider sabotaging itself instead of human error in the construction of a unique highly complex machine. That makes sense, everything we built always works the first time, must be time traveling. Granted, if Physicists didn't think like that we would probable not have Schrödinger's cat.
Also you may be waiting a while for your Higgs boson, according to the CERN Brochure,
"Although the particle collision rate at the LHC will be very high, the production rate of the Higgs will be so small that physicists expect to have enough statistics only after about 2-3 years of data-taking. The Higgs boson production rate strongly depends on the theoretical model and calculations used to evaluate it. Under good conditions, there is expected to be about one every few hours per experiment. The same applies to supersymmetric particles. Physicists expect to have the first meaningful results in about one year of data-taking at full luminosity."
However, competing with William of Ockham, we have the observation of Thomas Hardy: Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.
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