So the universe/future people/ The Doctor/ Pixies will have to be doing something about all of those. That should be noticeable, shouldn’t it? Uncounted millions of odd events all conspiring to stop these collisions happening? What would the universe do? How does it stop a high-powered particle impacting on a nickel-iron asteroid somewhere out in space?

Plus, and I know this is woo-woo as hell, it just feels… “wrong”. When we say things like “nature abhors a vacuum” we don’t actually mean that it hates it and actively intervenes in some fashion to get rid of it. We just mean that the nature of particle movements in gasses by natural processes expands that gas to fill the available space. Nothing in any of our experience has been “hated” by the universe. The most unstable trans-uranic elements decay immediately using perfectly normal radioactive processes – the machinery to create them doesn’t mysteriously break.

In this way, I think that if nature “hated” the Higgs Boson, then it simply won’t be possible to create it. Nature “hates” me flapping my arms, flying up to the top of the atmosphere, then pushing really hard so I fly FTL to Arcturus. Natural laws thus just don’t allow me to do it. If the Higgs Boson is contrary to natural law, then there is no Higgs Boson.

Finally, a bit of common sense here. The F-22 program, the Nimrod program, the computerisation of UK medical records and the Space Shuttle program all came in way, way after their original deadlines and way, way over their original budgets. Does this mean that some mysterious force from the future was interfering with these too? No, of course not. It simply means that huge projects – especially those on the edge of technological ability and scientific knowledge – are *hard* and often run into problems that optimistic planners didn’t envisage. Really, if it hadn’t been the LHC but a magnet in a new monorail train that had failed pushing the project back a year, would anyone be talking about a mysterious mechanism from the future intervening due to its fear or hatred of light public transport?

What a great way to cover your time-traveling tracks.

Nah, that’s crazy. Never mind.

I don’t know about those critters but as has been pointed out several times before in these LHC discussions, we get hit at least once a year by high energy cosmic rays with 10^21 electron volt energies,or, in other words a BILLION times more energy than the LHC could generate and cosmic rays of the energy of the LHC probably every second. So far, we’re still here,,,

GAry 7

Does the word hubris ring a bell?

There is only one version of time travel I know of that can actually work: a great big telescope. Unfortunately, we can’t get ahead of the wave front from our earth to see where we’ve come from, so we really need to make contact with another civilization 100,000 lights years away who can tell us what we were doing,,,100,000 years ago. Of course, that communication would take 200,000 years.

Oh well. Never mind.

Gary 7