The Large Hadron Collider and the need to protect the timeline.

The problem with this argument is that you cannot quite just not take it seriously:

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.

[snip]

“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail message. In an unpublished essay, Dr. Nielson said of the theory, “Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.” It is their guess, he went on, “that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”

Or, rather, that the reasons why you shouldn’t take this theory seriously involve physics that is beyond… well, I’m sure that my readers all understand them, but I remember being told that there was going to be no math involved, so I cheerfully take it on faith that there’s a reason why Niven’s Law (“If the universe of discourse permits the possibility of time travel and of changing the past, then no time machine will be invented in that universe”) doesn’t apply here.  Although I was very pleased to see that I had independently come to the same conclusion as Hans Moravec on the inevitable impossibility of time travel.  It seems… logical.

Via Instapundit.

Moe Lane