The Large Hadron Collider will shut down at the end of 2011 to address design and safety issues.
Until then, it will run at a maximum of 7 trillion electron volts…instead of its designed max of 14 trillion.
The problem involves the copper sheaths around the superconducting joints in the tunnel. The copper sheaths are a failsafe mechanism designed to take up the current if one of the magnets in the Large Hadron Collider warms up – an incident known as a … gulp…”quench”.
Apparently where Large Hadron Colliders are concerned, there’s nothing worse than hot magnets.
Dr. Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Dr. Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, a pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson particle, which physicists hope to produce with the Large Hadron 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.
As Niels Bohr, Dr. Nielsen’s late countryman and one of the founders of quantum theory, once told a colleague: “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”
Dr. Nielsen admits that he and Dr. Ninomiya’s new theory smacks of time travel, a longtime interest, which has become a respectable research subject in recent years. While it is a paradox to go back in time and kill your grandfather, physicists agree there is no paradox if you go back in time and save him from being hit by a bus. In the case of the Higgs and the collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus. Although just why the Higgs would be a catastrophe is not clear. If we knew, presumably, we wouldn’t be trying to make one.
Wednesday, March 10
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