Next Time The Cops Pull Me Over, I'm Blaming The Higgs Boson Particle

Via LG&M, it seems much like Kaiser Soze, the Higgs boson doesn't want to be found, and it will do whatever it takes to stop the Large Hadron Collider from finding it, according to a couple of scientists.

At first sight, this theory fits comfortably into the crackpot tradition linking the start-up of the LHC with terrible disasters. The best known is that the £3 billion particle accelerator might trigger a black hole capable of swallowing the Earth when it gets going. Scientists enjoy laughing at this one.

This time, however, their ridicule has been rather muted — because the time travel idea has come from two distinguished physicists who have backed it with rigorous mathematics.

What Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, are suggesting is that the Higgs boson, the particle that physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be “abhorrent to nature”.

What does that mean? According to Nielsen, it means that the creation of the boson at some point in the future would then ripple backwards through time to put a stop to whatever it was that had created it in the first place.

This, says Nielsen, could explain why the LHC has been hit by mishaps ranging from an explosion during construction to a second big bang that followed its start-up. Whether the recent arrest of a leading physicist for alleged links with Al-Qaeda also counts is uncertain.

Nielsen’s idea has been likened to that of a man travelling back through time and killing his own grandfather. “Our theory suggests that any machine trying to make the Higgs shall have bad luck,” he said.

“It is based on mathematics, but you could explain it by saying that God rather hates Higgs particles and attempts to avoid them.”

The math is rather fascinating. Basically the theory says that the very act of creating a Higgs boson so screws up the universe that the universe simply self-corrects and goes back in time to prevent the Higgs boson from ever being created in the first place, thus when the Large Hadron Collider says "OK, let's DO THIS" the act of trying to create the Higgs boson breaks the LHC.

No, really. If we ever found a Higgs boson, it would be bad, apparently. Super bad. We're trying to run a microwave with a piece of tinfoil in the circuit breaker box, and poof. It's that clever.

The Higgs boson. Responsible for everything unexplainably bad in the universe?