Tex the Pontificator

The New York Times reports:

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.

The article goes on the suggest:

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 am utterly innocent of advanced physics, but I am skeptical of this explanation of the fate of the U.S. supercollider. To explain what happened, all one need suppose is legislative incompetence, a far less exotic explanation than that the Higgs boson is altering the past. Occam's Razor.

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