Some
questions are so hard to answer that we have to
really
think about them (Anne Strieber reads her paper about this
for
subscribers
this week). For instance, if
time
travel exists, why can't we go back in time and kill our
grandparents (which means we would never have been born)?
The principle of least action means that could never happen,
because nature always takes the simplest and shortest route
to the solution of any problem, meaning that no effort to
assassinate an ancestor can succeed if it would mean that
you could not exist. Scientists think that
this principle is what will protect us from dangerous
repercussions from the
CERN
collider as well.
The Large Hadron Collider, which has been built underground
outside Geneva, Switzerland, has come back
on line and will hopefully discover parallel universes, dark
matter, black holes and generate the Higgs boson, which is
believed to be the fundamental building block of matter and
has been called the God
particle. But could CERN's effort to unlock secrets too
dangerous to reveal be sabotaged by IT'S OWN future? The
Higgs boson might be such a rogue particle that its detection
could resonate backward through time and stop (or even
destroy) the collider before detection can take place.
One reason scientists are worried about CERN's fate is
because of all the unusual
problems it has had so far. In the October 13th
edition of the New York Times, Dennis Overbye quotes Holger
Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, as
saying, "It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing
machines shall have bad luck. One could even almost say
that we have a model for God." It is his guess "that He rather
hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them."
If you want to learn all about time, join our
chat on
Wednesday!
Art credit: Dreamstime.com
