One of my favorite joke websites is called "Has the Large Hadron Collider Destroyed the World Yet?" Clearly, it hasn't. However, if there is some danger of the LHC turning the universe inside-out, the future may be trying to sabotage the project now in order to protect itself from being destroyed.
The way The New York Times' Dennis Overbye explains it, the result of the LHC's process "might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one." It's only conjecture and a healthy dose of wishful thinking, but that hasn't stopped some writers and scientists from wondering.
The idea itself sounds like something out of a Terminator movie. In order to save the future from destruction, Kyle Reese is sent back to protect Sarah Connor from the Terminator. Only in the real world scenario, the Terminator is the Large Hadron Collider, Sarah Connor is the universe, and Kyle Reese is, well, let's just call it fate.
Over the past two years, Holger Bech Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya have published papers theorizing the future's influence on the current LHC experiments. Clearly not content to accept the fact that things break, the two are sticking to their theory after a number of malfunctions and false starts to the project.
On his own blog, Alan Boyle chronicles the history of superconductor malfunctions and science fiction regarding the phenomenon. It's far too early to know whether this is simply a case of life imitating art, or if there is any credence to Nielsen and Ninomiya's idea, but as several others have said before, it's all likely just wishful thinking from daydreamers with Ph.D's.
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