Universe hates Higgs boson, Chicago Cubs - Tech Bytes - Action News
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Universe hates Higgs boson, Chicago Cubs - Tech Bytes

Universe hates Higgs boson, Chicago Cubs

By John Bowman, CBCNews

A physicist working on the Large Hadron Collider doesn't think much of the theory that the universe is sabotaging the project to prevent the discovery of the Higgs boson. Might as well say that Nature hates the Cubbies.

The Higgs boson is a theoretical particle that is predicted to exist based on current understanding of particle physics. Physicists think the Higgs particle could explain why some particles have mass and others don't.

In an interview with Scientific Computing, particle physicist Steven Nahn of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says the premise that the Higgs boson is somehow sending signals back through time to sabotage its own discovery is "fairly crazy."

"Exactly in line with their argument, I could say that Nature abhors the Chicago Cubs, such that the theory which describes the evolution of our universe prescribed Steve Bartman to interfere on October 14, 2003, extending the "bad luck" of the Cubbies," he said.

Steve Bartman was the Cubs fan who reached out for a foul ball in the eighth inning of Game 6 of the National League Championship Series, disrupting an attempt by the Cubs fielder to catch it. The Cubs were leading the game and the series, but went on to lose both. The Cubs still haven't won a championship since 1908.

Nahn acknowledged that many scientific theories sound pretty crazy at first, especially in the realms of particle physics and relativity:

In special relativity, there is the famous "twin paradox," a prediction that if you take a set of twins, leave one on Earth and send one traveling through space at nearly the speed of light, when the second one returns he will be younger than the one left behind. Sounds "crazy," meaning outside of our normal experience. But, in 1972, they put some atomic clocks on planes, flew them around the world, and indeed found that the moving ones were behind relative to ones left on the ground. Experiments like these are essential to have a theory accepted into the canon of physics.

The Higgs boson "Back to the Future" theory, on the other hand, can't really be tested and seems to have been created to explain the problems at the LHC, he said.

"Seems a little circular," Nahn said.

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