The Large Hadron Fucking Collider

This is some wild shit. The New York Times ran a fascinating article today about the terrifyingly powerful and mysterious Large Hadron Collider, the largest particle accelerator ever built, right near Geneva, Switzerland. Particle accelerators, for the uninitiated, fling protons around massive circular tubes at ridiculous speeds, smashing them into each other at the other end. The eggheads then study these collisions, in hopes of finding weird new particles, some that may have been around in the fractions of trillionths of a second before the Big Bang (these unobserved particles are known as the Higgs boson). The Large Hadron Collider is 18 miles long, and by far the most powerful particle accelerator ever built, and some scientists have expressed legitimate concern that the proton collisions could, in theory, create small black holes that could consume our entire galaxy. Which would be awful. Of course, their laid-back colleagues assure us these black holes would be small and inconsequential, and they would immediately collapse on themselves, or something. Whatever. They shouldn't be fucking with this kind of shit.



Well, at least it doesn't LOOK ominous.

And apparently, according to this article, some force in the future may be thinking along the same lines. You see, construction on the Large Hadron Collider was completed in the summer of 2008, and it has not worked properly or at it's maximum capacity once. It has broken down several times now, and they are currently at work fixing the last malfunction. It is now scheduled (if all goes according to their evil plans) to run again in December. Now, the nerdiest of the nerdy have postulated that these simple malfunctions may not just be coincidental.

A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

Zounds. Read the rest of the article here.