Martial Trezzini/European Pressphoto Agency

SUICIDE MISSION? The core of the superconducting solenoid magnet at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.

More than a year after an explosion of sparks, soot and frigid helium shut it down, the world’s biggest and most expensive physics experiment, known as the Large Hadron Collider, is poised to start up again. In December, if all goes well, protons will start smashing together in an underground racetrack outside Geneva in a search for forces and particles that reigned during the first trillionth of a second of the Big Bang.

Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No, I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that 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.

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 In an unpublished essay, Dr.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.”

You might think that the appearance of this theory is further proof that people have had ample time — perhaps too much time — to think about what will come out of the collider, which has been 15 years and $9 billion in the making.

The collider was built by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, to accelerate protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts around an 18-mile underground racetrack and then crash them together into primordial fireballs.

For the record, as of the middle of September, CERN engineers hope to begin to collide protons at the so-called injection energy of 450 billion electron volts in December and then ramp up the energy until the protons have 3.5 trillion electron volts of energy apiece and then, after a short Christmas break, real physics can begin.

Maybe.

Dr. Nielsen and Dr. Ninomiya started laying out their case for doom in the spring of 2008. It was later that fall, of course, after the CERN collider was turned on, that a connection between two magnets vaporized, shutting down the collider for more than a year.

Dr. Nielsen called that “a funny thing that could make us to believe in the theory of ours.”

He agreed that skepticism would be in order. After all, most big science projects, including the Hubble Space Telescope, have gone through a period of seeming jinxed. At CERN, the beat goes on: Last weekend the French police arrested a particle physicist who works on one of the collider experiments, on suspicion of conspiracy with a North African wing of Al Qaeda.

Dr. Nielsen and Dr. Ninomiya have proposed a kind of test: that CERN engage in a game of chance, a “card-drawing” exercise using perhaps a random-number generator, in order to discern bad luck from the future. If the outcome was sufficiently unlikely, say drawing the one spade in a deck with 100 million hearts, the machine would either not run at all, or only at low energies unlikely to find the Higgs.

Sure, it’s crazy, and CERN should not and is not about to mortgage its investment to a coin toss. The theory was greeted on some blogs with comparisons to Harry Potter. But craziness has a fine history in a physics that talks routinely about cats being dead and alive at the same time and about anti-gravity puffing out the universe.

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 is well-qualified in this tradition. He is known in physics as one of the founders of string theory and a deep and original thinker, “one of those extremely smart people that is willing to chase crazy ideas pretty far,” in the words of Sean Carroll, a Caltech physicist and author of a coming book about time, “From Eternity to Here.”

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Earthquake: A collapsed section of the Tomei Expressway in Makinohara, some 200km west of Tokyo, after a strong earthquake Photo: AFP

The earthquake – the second in two days – measured 6.5 on the Richter scale. It struck shortly after 5am with an epicentre located in the Pacific Ocean around 105 miles south-west of Tokyo.

Residents in the capital were woken in the early hours as buildings swayed and ornaments tumbled off shelves, while television footage showed shop aisles littered with fallen goods.

At least 43 people suffered injuries in the earthquake, mostly caused by falling objects, with two in a serious condition, according to a prefecture government official in Shizuoka.

As many as 9,500 power failures were triggered by the earthquake, while two reactors at the Hamaoka nuclear plant in Shizuoka shut down immediately during the quake with company officials later reporting “no abnormalities”.

Bullet trains between Tokyo and Osaka were suspended until safety checks resulted in resumed services several hours after the earthquake, which was followed by at least 13 aftershocks.

The earthquake coincided with the pending arrival of Tropical Storm Etau in the same area with at least 13 people having died in recent flooding and landslides west of the capital.

It took place two days after a magnitude 6.9 earthquake occurred south of Tokyo, resulting in swaying buildings and tremors in the capital.

Japan, located in a zone where four tectonic plates meet, is home to around 20 per cent of the world’s annual earthquakes.

Aerial view of flooded village of Shiao Lin in southern Taiwan’s Kaohsiung county (image released by Taiwan Military News Agency, 11 Aug 2009)

By William Ide
Hong Kong
11 August 2009

Taiwan officials say a mudslide triggered by heavy rains from Typhoon Morakot buried a mountain village in the southern part of the island. The fate of hundreds is unknown. The storm dumped as much as two meters of rain on the island before moving on to China.

Rescue helicopters made their way up into the mountains to reach Shiao Lin village, bringing food, water and supplies to those who survived the mudslide. Some have been transported to safety.

Leng Chia-yu, a spokesman at Taiwan’s disaster response agency, says the fate of an estimated 500 people who live in the village, which was wiped out when the mudslide hit Sunday, is still unclear.

Leng says that originally there were 150 buildings in Shiao Lin, but now only one or two are left. He says everything is gone, and officials do not know how many may have been buried.

Leng says that while helicopters reached the village Tuesday morning, rain and strong winds made it impossible for them to return in the afternoon.

A Taiwanese woman rides a life cutter with rescuers in floodwater following a heavy rain brought by typhoon Morakot in a street in Linbian town, southern of Taiwan, 08 Aug 2009

Before moving on to China, Typhoon Morokat brought the island the worst flooding it has seen in at least 50 years. Landslides have also hit other parts of the island. Swollen rivers have wiped out roads and sucked away houses, hotels and even a school.

Disaster officials say that as of Tuesday, the storm has killed 41 people and 62 are missing. Those figures do not include estimates for Shiao Lin.

Chinese state media say Typhoon Morakot triggered floods and a mudslide China’s east coast, and affected over eight million people.

Hundreds of thousands have been forced to flee their homes as the storm heads north. State media say a landslide in the town of Pengxi, in Zhejiang province, toppled a building, killing two people and seriously injuring four others.