This is the greatest news story ever in history. It's a little complicated, but it's worth it. Here's what's going on:
The yet-to-be-switched-on Hadron Collider in France is the biggest particle collider on earth. CERN built it to collide protons with each other to unlock some of the mysteries of particle physics, including producing a higgs boson, a presently theoretical quantum particle that has never been observed.
There are two possible problems with the collider:
- Some think it will create a "mini-blackhole" and destroy the entire planet.
- Others think turning on the machine will create a time paradox in which it impossible that the machine ever worked.
It's freaking our mind to think about it, so we'll re-print this:
As possible “evidence” for such a backwards-in-time effect, the authors cite the now-canceled Superconducting Super Collider (SSC)—a particle accelerator that was meant to hunt the Higgs and was partially constructed in Texas before Congress pulled the plug on the project. As the authors write in their paper: “Such a cancellation after a huge investment is already in itself an unusual event that should not happen too often. We might take this event as experimental evidence for our model in which an accelerator with the luminosity and beam energy of the SSC will not be built.”
We'll all get to find out what happens in Late October, when the machine is scheduled to be switched on... unless, of course, it never gets turned on, which might prove that it does get turned on in the future, but time flows backwards and something happens in the past to prevent it being used in the future to begin with...
