Sabotage...from the future?

Did you know that Switzerland has a particle accelerator? It does! A giant one, 100m underground on the border between Switzerland and France. It's called the Large Hadron Collider, and it might be the victim of sabotage. Not just any sabotage, though -- sabotage from the FUTURE.


Amy Davidson from the New Yorker blogs today:
Close Read: Past, Present, Future

Sometimes you wonder if scientists are just teasing you, or if journalists are. There was the Sokal Hoax, in 1994, when the physicist Alan Sokal published a paper on the “transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity” in the journal Social Text, as an experiment to prove that postmodernists couldn’t recognize nonsense when they saw it. And then there is Dennis Overbye’s piece in the Science Times, on a paper, by two “otherwise distinguished physicists” (New Science calls them “reasonably distinguished”) proposing that CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, a seventeen-mile-long underground tunnel in Switzerland, be put to work drawing cards from a deck just to be sure that forces from the future haven’t been sabotaging it. Why would forces from the future want to do a thing like that? Well, because

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…. In the case of the Higgs and the collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus.

Is this something we need to worry about? (“This” in that sentence refers not to the possibility that time travellers are messing with our doomsday machine, but to the state of the scientific imagination.) The paper must, on many levels, be a scientist's idea of a joke, or rather a scientist's way of pointing out how much trouble Hadron has been. A number of accidents (or “accidents”) have beset the collider—a magnet collapsed, pipes were contaminated by soot, and a technician was killed when a crane dropped its load. The collider, which had started up with great fanfare last September 10th, had to be shut nine days later, when the connection between two magnets suddenly vaporized, and a ton of liquid helium leaked into the tunnel. And now, “just as it is about to be switched on again, the theoretical physicists have thrown time travel into the mix,” as the Telegraph put it. Also, one of the authors of the paper, Holger Bech Nielsen, is a prominent string theorist—a qualification that, granted, in some circles makes him only slightly more respectable than the French physicist arrested a few days ago for alleged ties to Al Qaeda. That scientist had been working on the Hadron Collider. So did the Higgs boson plant an Al Qaeda operative in Switzerland? And, if so, what particle triggered his arrest?