NY Times or the Onion? Hard to tell :-)

Remember the Large Hadron Collider?  Remember all the hoopla that it would track down the mysterious particles that physicists are looking for?  And how the gigantic collider came to stop almost as soon as it revved up?  How about this for an explanation for what happened?

the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the 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.

So, let me get this.  This tiny, tiny, particle whose theoretical existence needs to be validated travelled back in time and threw a spanner in the works, so to say, because it is so abhorrent to nature.  Oh my! 
Guess what?  it is not from the Onion.  It is NY Times science report, which adds:

Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, put this idea forward in a series of papers with titles like “Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal” and “Search for Future Influence From LHC,” posted on the physics Web site arXiv.org in the last year and a half.
According to the so-called Standard Model that rules almost all physics, the Higgs is responsible for imbuing other elementary particles with mass.
“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail message. In an unpublished essay, Dr. Nielson said of the theory, “Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.” It is their guess, he went on, “that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”
This malign influence from the future, they argue, could explain why the United States Superconducting Supercollider, also designed to find the Higgs, was canceled in 1993 after billions of dollars had already been spent, an event so unlikely that Dr. Nielsen calls it an “anti-miracle.”

I suppose it is only a very fine line between wisdom from a genius and crap from a nutcase :-)  And, yes, the report addresses that too:

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.”

Will we be around on September 11th?

These LHC [Large Hadron Collider] opponents fear that the Earth could be destroyed by vacuum bubbles, magnetic monopoles, microscopic black holes, or strangelets produced by the high-energy proton-proton collisions planned by CERN physicists. Vacuum bubbles have been described as a kind of "cosmic cancer." If it turns out that there is a lower energy state into which the universe could settle, then the LHC might produce "bubbles" of such a state which would then expand, ripping apart the Earth and eventually the entire universe. If magnetic monopoles were produced they might induce protons to decay and thus destroy normal matter. Microscopic black holes might grow by gobbling up the Earth. And strangelets are combinations of quarks that theoretically interact with normal matter and transform it into strange matter.

That was Ronald Bailey reporting on the scheduled switching on of the collider on September 10th. Bailey goes on to write, the empirical evidence is that the universe has been running trillions of these high-energy physics "experiments" for billions of years without disastrous results. In fact, Ord's colleagues Nick Bostrom and Max Tegmark from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology calculate that the empirical evidence suggests a conservative estimate of the annual risk that LHC-like experiments would destroy the earth is 1-in-a-trillion. At the end of his talk, Mangano reminded the Oxford conferees, "Jeopardizing the future of scientific research would be a global catastrophe." Any theory, model, or calculation that suggests otherwise is clearly flawed.

In other words, don't party like it is the end of the world. Interested in understanding how the LHC works? Click here.

The horrible thing is that a few non-scientists (or is that nonsensists?) are so hysterical about the end of the world that, according to the Telegraph, the American Nobel prize winning physicist Frank Wilczek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has even had death threats, said Prof Brian Cox of Manchester University, adding: "Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a twat."
The head of public relations, James Gillies, says he gets tearful phone calls, pleading for the £4.5 billion machine to stop.

BTW, given the significance of September 11th, couldn't the scientists at CERN have picked a different date? At least a week later? Or, is the 10th THE day for the experiment for some cosmological reasons?