Time Travelers: Futurenauts Using Ultra-duper Atomsmasher

The entire particle physics community is counting down to May like it was their birthday, Christmas and the Second Coming of the Lord all wrapped up in a clutch of Superbowls. It's when the Large Hadron Collider comes online, but while most are hoping for data and praying for the bashful Higgs boson to finally show it's tiny little face, some Russian mathematicians are warning that we might get more than we bargained for. Specifically, time-travellers: futurenauts using our ultra-duper atomsmasher to punch a hole in causality and hop back from the future.

The idea dates back to Einstein's explanation that spacetime can be deformed by large energies or masses. Since the Large Hadron Collider is a twenty-six kilometer ring of superconducting magnets designed to do nothing but give a particle as large an energy as possible, that sounds like it could be an issue. Small deformations in spacetime (like Earth) give us the force of gravity, severe deformations give the cosmological trash compacting black holes, and an extreme case could cause a wormhole - a link between two points as spacetime folds over to touch itself (no sniggering).

When asked about this risk, CERN scientists just look at the sky - but they aren't daydreaming, they're providing a counter example. Even the most massive human experiment is a pale imitation of the galactic-sized particle accelerators that fire cosmic radiation at us daily, and with all that high-energy activity in the sky if techno-mutants from the year Q4099 did want to invade they wouldn't have to hang around supercooled Genevese caverns to do it.

The Russians aren't the first to raise concerns over the "Let's bang these things together REALLY HARD" school of research - Dr Walter Wagner has been campaigning for years to stall the LHC program until someone can convince him that turning it on won't detonate the universe. He accuses the scientists involved of downplaying the risks, using his own kind of maths to "show" a 10% chance of everything ever going kablooey. The basic formula is "it's very unlikely BUT it would kill EVERYTHING so that multiplies up the risk", which might sound reasonable, but by the same argument I could say "Nobody eat apples in case one contains a rare virus that could RENDER EVERYONE IN THE WORLD STERILE". He even has a donation site to raise money for legal action, but considering he's going up against a five billion dollar twenty-country co-operative project, his chances of winning are even unlikelier than his fears.

Posted by Luke McKinney.

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