“While it is a paradox to go back in time and kill your grandfather, physicists agree there is no paradox if you go back in time and save him from being hit by a bus. In the case of the Higgs (boson) and the (Large Hadron) collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus.” – Dannis Overbye of the New York Times, in his article The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate.

CERNS's Large Hadron Collider

Mr Overbye is referring to a theory about the Large Hadron Collider proposed by well respected physicists Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Japan.

For those not familiar with the Large Hadron Collider, it is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, designed by CERN to find the elusive ‘God Particle,’ aka the Higgs Boson, which could help scientists answer some fundamental questions about physics. When it was announced the project was met with international controversy amid the usual doomsday predictions. Nielsen and Ninomiya share the theory that the Higgs boson could have devastating effects, however they believe the universe might have it covered.

In the New York Times article that revealed their theory to the world, Overbye wrote that Nielsen and Ninomiya predicted that the ‘Higgs boson… might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one.’

They made this prediction in late 2007.  The next year when the LHC was turned on for the first time it broke spectacularly, forcing CERN scientists to shut it down, not to be restarted again until December this year.

Nielsen and Ninomiya also cite a 1993 experiment designed to find the Higgs boson that was cancelled after billions of dollars had been invested into the project. They believe that coincidences like these could continue to prevent the LHC from working, thus saving us from the potentially catastrophic creation of a Higgs boson.

Whether the creation of a Higgs boson would actually be catastrophic remains to be seen, and even Nielsen and Ninomiya encourage skepticism, though they have proposed an experiment to test the theory. They believe that if they can prove that there are a statistically unlikely number of failures in attempts to create the Higgs boson, this will show that the level of unluckiness cannot be accounted for by chance and therefore requires an explanation. And they have one.

The scientific community has met their proposals with a mix of skepticism and interest. The theory of time travel has gained some real scientific grounding in recent years, and if it is to be taken seriously, Nielsen and Ninomiya have a claim too. Physics has long been known to be counter intuitive and riddled with oddities. Could this be another unexpected but theoretically possible idea?

In my article Can You Change the Past? I explained how coincidences can prevent the paradoxes of time travel. Go back in time and try to kill your own grandfather, and some coincidence will stop you – it has to, in fact, because something already did stop you, otherwise how could you have ever been born? And if we are to believe Nielsen and Ninomiya then coincidences and accidents will continue to plague the LHC and any other attempts we make to create a Higgs boson particle. Yet even if you believe the theory of coincidences in time travel, this real world application of the idea suddenly makes it harder to accept. But does that make it wrong?

For further reading, here Nielsen and Ninomiya’s paper:
Search for Effect of Influence from Future in Large Hadron Collider