Never Mind The Large Hadron Collider, Here Comes The Higgs Boson

With the universe on one side possibly trying to stop the evil of the Higgs boson particle and science on the other, the fateful showdown to see what the Large Hadron Collider can do is coming ever closer.

The collider made headlines last week when a bird apparently dropped a "bit of baguette" into the accelerator, making the machine shut down. The incident was similar in effect to a standard power cut, said spokeswoman Katie Yurkewicz. Had the machine been going, there would have been no damage, but beams would have been stopped until the machine could be cooled back down to operating temperatures, she said.

As it begins to run at full energy, greater than any machine of its kind, the LHC will help scientists explore important questions about the universe. The ambitious project also has attracted its share of doubters.

Some alarmists expressed fear last year that the accelerator could produce a black hole that might swallow the universe -- a theory that LHC physicists, including Myers, dismiss as science fiction.

Another fringe theory holds that the LHC will never function properly because it is under "influence from the future," according to physicists Holger Bech Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya. They suggest in recent papers that no supercolliders that could produce the Higgs boson, an as-yet-unseen particle that would help answer fundamental questions about matter in the universe, will work because something in the future stops them.

This also explains the "negative miracle" of Congress canceling the Superconducting Supercollider project in Texas in 1993, Nielsen wrote in a paper on arXiv.org, a site where math and science scholars post academic papers.

"One could even almost say that we have a model for God," one who "hates the Higgs particles," Nielsen wrote.

The Higgs boson is out there, man. And it's hungry to be free.

Then again if the universe does self-correct to prevent Higgs bosons from being formed, you would think the universe would be doing a better job of it. Then again, maybe when this thing gets switched on, the universe will do a better job of "preventing" it, kinda like the way nuclear explosions prevent living.

Or maybe it's just taunting us. I wonder what would happen if you had a Schrodinger's Cat experiment with a cat named Higgs Boson...