Large Hadron Collider, Geneva

Since that first, primordial act of disobedience, Man’s insatiable lust for knowledge has been a sickle that has reaped a harvest bountiful in tears as well as forbidden ecstasies. Even now, as the ultimate secrets of coy Nature seem at last to lie within our grasp, are we tottering on the edge our own Icarus moment, when overweening ambition will cast us headlong into the abyss; or has Hope come in a humble shape and bearing Salvation in its beak?

From an unexpected quarter, it seems that the planet—if not the space-time continuum itself—may have narrowly avoided an uncertain doom at the hands of Europe’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a multi-billion-dollar machine designed to unlock the workings of matter, mass, energy, and time by throwing atoms together, very, very fast, and very, very hard.

In the early hours of November 3, the temperature in sections 7-8 and 8-1 of the LHC, a complex of subterranean tunnels that lies beneath the Franco-Swiss border, began to rise alarmingly. Inexplicably, the collider had lost power, and the cooling system was failing. Peaking at a 400 percent increase—from a standard operating temperature of a few degrees above absolute zero to a balmy 8 degrees Kelvin (a.k.a. negative 445 degrees Fahrenheit)—the two lengths of tunnel were perilously close to the thermal threshold at which the LHC’s super-cooled, superconducting magnets lose their super powers of particle acceleration and become merely mild-mannered, everyday “warm” magnets.

It was Christine Sutton, a spokesperson from CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which runs the LHC, who had to announce the humiliating news that the mighty $6 billion supercollider had been crippled by a power outage caused by a piece of bread dropped by a passing bird.

“There was an interruption in the power supply,” Sutton stated, “just like you might have a power cut at home. The person who went to investigate discovered bread and a bird eating the bread.” This pano-avian intrusion had apparently shorted one of the complex’s above ground copper conductors, which cut power to the cooling system.

Dr. Mike Lamont, machine coordinator at CERN and self-described “general dogsbody” expressed the situation more alliteratively in this improvised line of ancient Anglo-Saxon verse: “A bit of baguette on the busbars.”

A press release on the CERN website later updated: “The bird escaped unharmed but lost its bread.”

As absurdly compelling as this story is, CERN nevertheless buried the real lede: In none of its statements did the organization mention the esteemed Danish physicist who had predicted that the collider would be plagued by just such freakish “bad luck” or his provocative mathematical model that suggests events like the bread-bombarding bird might be directed from forces emanating from the future—guided, perhaps, by the manifest will of the universe or perhaps even by God Himself.

Secret, volcano-based SPECTRE super-villain complex, off the coast of Kobe, Japan

But before we investigate this remarkable claim, let me offer a brief excursion into the background of the HLC. A project 20 years in the making, the HLC has gone largely unnoticed in the U.S. outside the science and tech community. But in Europe it has been polarizing. Lurking beneath the environs of Lake Geneva, like a SPECTRE super-villain base in a James Bond film, the ultra-high-tech LHC is a project of breath-taking audacity. It aims to use powerful superconducting magnets to accelerate streams of particles a hair’s breadth shy of light speed and then smash the massively energized particles together.

If all goes well, the collisions produced by the LHC will recreate in miniature the conditions that existed a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang and generate a plethora of fleeting subatomic particles—including the elusive Higgs boson, whose existence has been conjectured but never confirmed and which is thought to be responsible for the phenomenon of mass. Let me repeat that so it sinks in: The Higgs boson is the subatomic particle that’s responsible for giving mass to everything that exists. Isolating one of these would be a very big deal.

Ambition such as is evinced in the LHC never comes without a hubristic shadow side. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the scheme has engendered heated opposition—particularly once the news became widely circulated that the list of quixotic products that could emanate from all that subterranean super colliding includes such horrors as mini-black holes and explosions whose magnitudes could surpass any previously known on earth.

The misgivings of the doubtful have been by no means allayed by a series of freak incidents that have plagued the LHC since it opened in September of last year. Just nine days after powering up, the LHC was forced to close, after an accident with the magnets led to the spilling of thousands of gallons of liquid hydrogen coolant. Repairs took more than a year to complete, and the LHC was just beginning to hit its stride again, when the saboteur bird tossed a baguette in the works. In the meanwhile, a physicist connected with the collider was arrested by French police on suspicion of conspiracy with Al Qaeda.

Scientists respond that any project as massively complex as the LHC—the world’s largest machine, whose interior must be kept colder and emptier than deep space and whose energy consumption equals that of the entire canton of Geneva—will inevitably undergo teething pains. They point out that the accidents thus far have been completely harmless, and, moreover, they maintain that critics’ doomsday fears are based on a profound misunderstanding of physics.

In Europe, where social conventions do not accord the ignorant and outspoken the same solicitude we allow them in this country, scientific pushback has been vigorous. University of Manchester professor and CERN researcher Dr. Brian Cox has stated authoritatively, “Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a twat.”

That from a man whose C.V. includes a stint in the ‘90s synthpop band D:Ream, whose U.K. top-20 hit “Things Can Only Get Better” sucks even harder than Howard Jones’s ‘80s synthpop song of the same name.

LHC is A-OK for Queen axeman Dr. Brian May.

(As befits a rock ‘n’ roll legend, astrophysicist and lead guitarist for Queen, Dr. Brian May, also an enthusiastic LHC booster, has chosen to accent the positive, rather than vilify the opposition. He has been known to refer to the LHC as the “Large Hardon Collider.”)

Not everyone in the scientific community defends the LHC, however. Dr. Holger B. Nielsen, a fellow at Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute and a man who is considered one of the fathers of string theory, dismisses black-hole panic but sees a potentially “miraculous” pattern at work and speculates that what he calls the LHC’s run of “bad luck” may actually be the universe’s way of telling us that the collider and the quixotic fundamental particles it may produce are fundamentally “abhorrent to nature.” In a series of papers posted on the physics website arXive.org, Dr. Nielsen, in collaboration with Dr. Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, argues that, for reasons yet unknown, the universe cannot abide the Higgs boson. He conjectures that creating large numbers of these particles might actually send ripples through time that will cause (has caused…? will have caused…?) the future to intervene and alter the past in order to prevent the creation of these Higgs particles in the first place.

I’m not much of a mathematician and Dr. Nielsen is not much of writer, but I have read every word of his paper “Test of Effect from Future in Large Hadron Collider; a Proposal,” and the gist is plain enough: “If an accelerator potentially existed that could generate a large number of Higgs particles…then such a machine should practically never be realized!” (Yes, Dr. Nielsen is a scientist who uses exclamation marks.) The mathematical models Dr. Nielsen employs allow for the present to be shaped by causal chains that extend not just from the past but from the future as well. This may challenge ordinary logic, but it’s not forbidden by the rules of classical physics, which for the most part work as well backwards as they do forwards. Dr. Nielsen concedes that influence from the future is typically slight; however, his equations show that the sway of “reverse chronological causation” is “unusually large in the case of the Higgs [particle]. … This possibility makes it likely that…cases of the future influencing  even the initial conditions, and thus the past may occur when the Higgs [particle] is involved.” I trust Dr. Nielsen’s math is sharper than his syntax, but if that statement is somewhat muddy, his conclusion is tolerably limpid: “Thus, we predict possibly that the initial state [i.e. the past—or is it the future...?] would have been organized somehow so that a large Higgs-particle-producing machine such as the LHC should somehow be prearranged so as not to come into existence.” Or, as he told the New York Times, “God…rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.” Thus, “it must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck.”

As examples of this prearranged “bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen points not only to the, quote-unquote, accidents that have affected the LHC, but also to the scrapping in the U.S. of the Superconducting Super Collider, which would have been America’s answer to the LHC. In 1993, Congress voted to cancel the project, which had run woefully over-budget. Dr. Nielsen finds this act of financial prudence so unlikely that he labels it an “anti-miracle” and ascribes it to divine intervention.

The scientific community at large has not raced to embrace Dr. Nielsen’s hypothesis about the LHC. But many admire his daft bravado. Dr. Nielsen is a scientist who is not afraid to punctuate his technical writing the way a 14-year-old girl would; neither does he shrink from using words heavily laden with non-scientific significance, such as luck, miracle, or God. Although his way of paring down these resonant terms to mathematical variables can be brutally Procrustean, it is nonetheless bracing to see a theoretician confront these facts of lived experience head on and attempt to find an accommodation for them within physics.

That doesn’t mean that he succeeds. It is with deliberate provocation that Dr. Nielsen writes “one could even almost say that we have a model for God.” But when the smoke clears, he leaves us with the underwhelming and probably tautological assertion that God  “may here be roughly identified with fundamental physical influences from the future.”  —Then again, is this distant and abstract God so terribly different from the heavily intellectualized First Cause or Unmoved Mover posited by Thomas Aquinas?

Yes, I suppose it is.

When Sir Isaac Newton wasn’t quantifying gravity or inventing calculus, he diverted himself by calculating dates for biblical prophecies, so Dr. Nielsen’s incorporating acts of God into his equations isn’t exactly without precedent in respectable science. But his definition is anemic and unnecessarily minimalist—particularly in light of the vivid examples we have of the divine Will at work in the supernatural intercessions at the LHC.

Let us try our own thought exercise. “What sort of Supreme Being,” we might ask ourselves “would choose to smite His foes with a baguette-bearing bird?” It doesn’t take any complex math to reach the conclusion that the Divinity must be the sort of entity that wears a hoodie and enjoys Devendra Banhart. If I could recall my trigonometry, I am certain that I could reckon whether it is within the walls of a Silverlake bungalow or a Williamsburg loft that His beatific Tweeness has elected to dwell, and exactly how much rent His parents are paying for it.

But allow me to put aside these metaphysical speculations and return to the mater at hand. Today the LHC is once again up and running. While we here in the States were sleeping off our Thanksgiving dinners, operators at CERN were celebrating the completion of a successful low-speed collision. No Higgs bosons yet, but experiments will step up in the new year, and then the hunt will be on in earnest.

I await to see what God will have to say about that.

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