"God rather hates Higgs particles and attempts to avoid them".

or so suggests physicist Holger Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. I’ve been following the various crackpot theories of how the Large Hadron Collider at Cern will lead to the end of the world, if not the end of the Yankees, with mild amusement. This is equally amusing, but it’s not sourced from the tin foil hat brigade, but a couple real live physicists doing, presumably, real live physics and mathematics. The basic theory is that the Higgs boson does not want to be found, and will go back in time to disable any bit of kit designed to reveal it, even if that kit cost £3 Billion.

And . . . he is not being rejected out of hand by physicists associated with the LHC. For example, Professor Brian Cox at the University of Manchester suggests that:

“His ideas are theoretically valid. What he is doing is playing around at the edge of our knowledge, which is a good thing.”

“He is pointing out that we don’t yet have a quantum theory of gravity, so we haven’t yet proved rigorously that sending information into the past isn’t possible.”

Which basically says that it’s theoretically possible, but with a strong implied undercurrent of “not bloody likely”. In case it is, however, Cox has all his bases covered:

“However, if time travellers do break into the LHC control room and pull the plug out of the wall, then I’ll refer you to my article supporting Nielsen’s theory that I wrote in 2025.”