The LHC and Fate: recent NYT article

I've been dying to chime in amongst the raucous of commentary surrounding Dennis Overbye's NYT article "The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate." The bloggosphere has chewed this one up and spit it out a few times, and today, the article came up in a phone conversation between me and a physicist friend.

Is this for real?
"...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...."

It sounds like a farce. Then, on the second reading, i realized what the article was really about: the wonky-craziness of theoretical physics and how genius often involves going way out on a limb in your thinking. (At least i hope this was what it was about--the theme was a bit buried. So buried that, in my opinion, the article seemed to give too much credibility to the bizarre, unpopular, and certainly untested theory.)

Fairly, my physicist phone-buddy wanted to go over the facts of Neilsen's theory to judge if this was, in fact, nonsense or whether it was simply a creative interpretation of a plausible concept.

There is conflicting commentary all over the web...

from phsyicscentral
"The Collider, the Particle, and a Theory About Fate" goes out on a limb—a really long limb—and discusses a fringe idea..."


Physicist Sean Carrol, quoted in the article, from Cosmic Variance.
"The theory is undeniably crazy — but not crackpot, which is a distinction worth drawing. And an occasional fun essay about speculative science in the Times is not going to send us back to the Dark Ages, or even rank among the top ten thousand dangers along those lines."

Comment below the Times article, MM from Chicago
"What I find most most amazing reading these comments is the scientific illiteracy of people who otherwise are probably well educated. Examples: (1) comments that entropy is a fundamental law (its not fundamental), (2) comments that the universe is deterministic in nature (physics stopped believing that over fifty years ago), (3) comments that traveling backwards in time is impossible (not at the quantum level).

People, there has been a revolution in physics. Its came out of quantum mechanics and from the theory of relativity. The old science you learned in high school was not entirely accurate. Pick up a good book on modern physics. You will be awed."

In theoretical physics, it's often difficult to draw the line between what is creative and what is just plain crazy. Everyone has their own definitions.