Hadron Confused: The Bird, Bread and Most Recent Dread

I hate to say I told you so. For starters, it's rude as heck.

Secondly, and more significantly, I cannot pretend to have an adequate grasp of the very high-level theoretical physics whose threads are woven into and throughout the ongoing drama that is CERN's Large Hadron Collider.

What I do know is the going continues to get rough, and weird, at the world's most expensive (and, perhaps, the universe's most abhorrent) science experiment.

A couple weeks back, Tonic wrote about the resumption of activity at the LHC after a year-long delay necessitated by equipment failure. In the same article, we alerted our readers to a fascinating New York Times article which explored a hypothesis every bit as unsettling as fascinating. Two highly respected physicists put forth the notion of ongoing difficulties at LHC, as well as at other projects intent on the same technical goals but that failed to get off the ground, as not mere accident or happenstance.

Instead, Holger Bech Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya posit that the Higgs boson (the elusive, theorized but never definitively observed elemental sub-particle) may be so anathema to the order of the cosmos that its discovery in our time is being undone by some entity or force sent back from the future to prevent its being discovered and to prevent whatever manner of quantum fury its discovery might unleash.

I'm not making it up. These are serious, reputable scientific minds, so if you missed it, please revisit this absolutely fascinating NYT piece from mid-October.

Nor am I making up the latest setback, which a friend brought to my attention by way of a link to Popular Science: a bird has dropped a piece of bread into the ventilation system, causing components to overheat and necessitating additional delays.

No word from CERN or Popular Science has come forth regarding if it was a raven or some other variety of bird throwing a wrench made from the staff of life into the works.

We do learn through Popular Science that the CERN team intends to forge ahead with the planned schedule to perform full-powered particle acceleration and attendant experiments in December and January (unforeseen and unanticipated circumstances notwithstanding, naturally).

Photo courtesy of Arpad Horvath, via Wikimedia Commons