Is the Hadron Collider Being Sabotaged By Time Travelers?

When the Hadron Collider was under construction, there were many people who warned that running the Collider could cause the world, or even the universe, to blow up. Since its completion, the Collider has been plagued by setbacks that have kept it from being fully operational. Now Time Magazine reports that two highly regarded physicists have a theory as to why the Hadron Collider has had so many problems: the physicists think that time travelers may be sabotaging the Collider.

The most recent setback was a bizarre event in which a bird shut the Collider down by dropping a baguette into the Collider from from its beak. But the physicists think that maybe it occurred for a reason:

While most scientists would write off the event as a freak accident, two esteemed physicists have formulated a theory that suggests an alternative explanation: perhaps a time-traveling bird was sent from the future to sabotage the experiment. Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, have published several papers over the past year arguing that the CERN experiment may be the latest in a series of physics research projects whose purposes are so unacceptable to the universe that they are doomed to fail, subverted by the future.

Wow. Not sure what else to say. But it's amazing that physicists are actually proposing a theory as seemingly outlandish as time travelers sabotaging the Hadron Collider. It's equally amazing that the opponents of the theory didn't dismiss it out of hand, but rather, made scientific arguments to rebut it.

You'd expect other physicists to laugh the time traveling bird theory out of hand as being absurd. Yet they didn't. Even though they don't agree with the theory, they apparently don't automatically dismiss the concept of time travel (or even of time traveling birds). It must be because they're (apparently) theoretical physicists. It's been my experience that theoretical physicists are a special breed.

But they're also the guys who push the game forward.

The Johns Hopkins News-Letter has more.