The Large Hadron Collider flips the bird
You may have heard that on November 3, the Large Hadron Collider was shut down because one of its sectors began to overheat. Research revealed that it was caused by a bird who dropped a piece of bread on one of the electrical substations that sits above the accelerator. Once this “baguette” was removed, the Collider was back online within a couple days. While it may be a bit disconcerting that something as simple as a bird could cause such problems, you won’t believe the speculations of a couple of scientists.
From Time.com:
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.
Of course, most physicists think this is ridiculous. They claim that the Collider would do nothing more than what happens within nature on a daily basis. But this is not good enough for Nielsen and Ninomiya.
In a series of audacious papers, Nielsen and Ninomiya have suggested that setbacks to the LHC occur because of “reverse chronological causation,” which is to say, sabotage from the future. The papers suggest that the Higgs boson may be “abhorrent to nature” and the LHC’s creation of the Higgs sometime in the future sends ripples backward through time to scupper its own creation. Each time scientists are on the verge of capturing the Higgs, the theory holds, the future intercedes. The theory as to why the universe rejects the creation of Higgs bosons is based on complex mathematics, but, Nielsen tells TIME, “you could explain it [simply] by saying that God, in inverted commas, or nature, hates the Higgs and tries to avoid them.”
Wait a minute. Let’s examine the facts: It was just a few months ago that a flock of birds took out Capt. Sully’s US Airways plane; we all are using “Twitter;” Big Bird is all over the news because the Sesame Street’s 40th anniversary; and then there was the bird flu. It is all making sense now.
I think Alfred Hitchcock may have been a prophet.
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I don't have the math for this one. Ok, I'm not even close and maybe 15 people in the world understand what these guys are talking about. Realize though that this paper was written a while ago (pre bird). What a beautiful concept, even if it's wacky and/or wrong.
My wife, upon hearing of this theory, immediately asked if anyone had done examined the bird. My thought from her question is to do a DNA sequencing on the bird. Does it have anything in its genetics that is outside today's genome. Think about the f'n impications if THAT happened.
As it happens, I'm going to a lecture on the large hadron colllider tomorrow afternoon. I'll be interested to ask the physicist giving the lecture about the 'back to the future' pigeon theory!