Gallery I
Quest For The Higgs Bosom
Home
Index Page 2
Index Page 3

Was It Bird Poop That Stopped The Collider?

By James Donahue

Nature appears to have a great sense of humor. It has been reported that a bird dropped something into the mechanism of the $9 billion Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland that literally gummed up the works.

News reports say it appeared to have been a piece of bread that fell into some ultra sensitive part of the machinery, just as workers were in the process of starting the collider once again for some preliminary tests. (We wonder if that wasn’t just a polite way of avoiding talking about what birds normally drop when they fly over a freshly washed car or something as intricate as a hadron collider.) Whatever fell from the sky, it shut the collider down cold.

For those who need to be briefed on what this machine is, it is a 17-mile-long underground doughnut-shaped tube near Geneva. It is designed to propel molecular composites of quarks called hadrons around this massive tube at nearly the speed of light. The idea is to send the hadrons in both directions at once, causing them to crash into each other just to see what will happen.

Some scientists have expressed concerns about such a radical experiment. For example, the physicists involved with the project say they hope to simulate events that occurred at the Big Bang, or the beginning of the creation of the universe as we know it. Some fear that smashing hadrons together at high speed might do something really weird like create microscopic black holes that would begin to grow, swallowing up all surrounding matter until they destroy the world.

Yet another part of the project has been an attempt to produce and capture an obscure particle called the Higgs Boson. This is theoretically a composite particle that acts as a glue to hold other particles together and turn matter into mass. Physicist Peter Higgs dreamed up the concept as a way of solving the problem of how matter can have mass.

The people asking questions like this live in the world of quantum physics. They become so bent on finding solutions to their questions they are willing to devote their lives to building machines like the hedron collider and spending amazing sums of money in their quest for knowledge.

We do know that once scientists knew how to smash an atom, it wasn’t long before world militaries possessed the most destructive bomb ever known to contemporary man.

The Geneva project has been plagued with serious problems almost from the start.

In October, 2005, a technician was killed in the tunnel when a crane load fell on him. Then in March, 2007, a cryogenic magnet support broke in the midst of a pressure test because of a major design flaw.

More trouble occurred in the fall of 2008 during powering tests when an electrical fault caused a rupture and a leak of liquid helium. The project was delayed again until this fall. Technicians were just starting to crank up the system for preliminary testing scheduled for December when the odd incident with the bird fly-over occurred.

It has been strangely theorized by physicists Holger Bech Nielsen of Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of Kyoto, Japan, that the machine may be sabotaged by its own future. As explained by New York Times writer Dennis Overbye, Nielsen and Ninomiya suggest that the creation of the hypothesized 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, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.”

A writer in the Daily Kos, using the pen name Cenobyte, carries this theory even farther into strangeness. He points to the Many Worlds Theory in which there exist an infinite number of parallel universes.

Supposing that a successful operation of the Large Hedron Collider creates a Higgs Boson (and/or a black hole) that destroys the universe. “Then the more and more preposterous shutdowns of the LHC that occur would suggest that ours is a universe that survives specifically because of freak accidents and statistically very unlikely problems,” Cenobyte writes.

“If the Higgs Boson particle cannot exist within our universe without annihilating it, then the more ridiculous the shutdowns become, it seems the more likely it is that our universe is the one in which the LHC never actually gets to the point where it generates a Higgs Boson particle.”

Again we point out that in our communications with The Abba Father, an entity from another dimension, we have been assured that spiritual forces are making sure the collider will do no harm.