3 Questions: Steven Nahn on the elusive Higgs boson
In September 2008, scientists at CERN sent the first beams of protons running through the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's most powerful particle accelerator. CERN scientists hope to produce the elusive Higgs boson and other novel particles. But the project has seen numerous setbacks. An explosion caused by a failed connection between two magnets last autumn led to a yearlong delay in all operations. And earlier this month, French police arrested a French-Algerian postdoc working at the LHC on charges of terrorism. Two physicists recently put forth a new theory on why the accelerator has encountered so many delays. Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, suggest that the hypothesized Higgs boson would have such harmful effects that the particle is essentially traveling back through time to stop its own creation.