Does nature abhor the Large Hadron Collider? Or has someone or something from the future gone back in time, “Terminator”-like, to disable it?
The $9 billion dollar scientific instrument - designed to create the Higgs boson particles thought to be present at the birth of the universe - has been plagued with explosions and delays, while rumors circulated that it could spawn a black hole, destroying all life on Earth.
A coincidence? Two physicists, Holger Bech Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya, think not.
Dr. Nielsen even postulated that the supposed vandalism might be of a very high order, The Times reported. “One could even almost say that we have a model for God,” he wrote in an essay, suggesting that “He rather hates Higgs particles and attempts to avoid them.”
God and time-traveling saboteurs notwithstanding, the Swiss collider was successfully powered up on November 30 (although it suffered a massive electrical failure the next day).
But the two physicists are part of a grand tradition of otherwise sober scientists willing to stretch their thinking . From conscious robots to cryptozoology, serious science and fringe theories regularly intersect.
One example is Robert Rines, an inventor with over 800 patents who died last month at 87. He taught at Harvard University and pioneered radar, sonar and ultrasound technologies . He also spent decades searching for the Loch Ness Monster and sought a method for stopping tornadoes.
“They can just call me crazy, and that’s O.K. by me,” Mr. Rines said in 2008. “At least I won’t go to jail for it, like Galileo.”
Other scientists are busy predicting the Singularity, an event that others have dubbed “The Rapture of the Nerds.” That would be the moment when computers, not unlike Hal in the film “2001: a Space Odyssey,” become superintelligent, self aware and, just possibly, dangerous. Some even believe it could occur in a few decades.
“I see the debate over whether we should build these artificial intellects as becoming the dominant political question of the century,” Hugo de Garis, an artificial-intelligence researcher, told The Times. Mr. Garis believes that such intelligent machines could spark a devastating global war.
And Dr. Vernor Vinge, a computer scientist and novelist, told The Times that ruling robots could use us the way we use oxen and donkeys.
If we can’t beat the robots, we might have some novel opportunities to join them. Raymond Kurzweil, a futurist and artificial intelligence pioneer, believes that we could attain a form of post-human immortality by uploading the contents of our brains into computers.
Dr. Kurzweil has a generally utopian view of the Singularity and believes the rise of computers is only good. In case he’s wrong, theoretical physicists are dreaming up some cutting-edge escape plans. Wormholes - tunnel-like passages through space and time - could allow us to jump from star to star or century to century, if indeed they do exist.
In theory, we might be able to migrate to a far-off world where the machines are nicer to us. Or, at the very least, travel into the future and put a stop to those pesky saboteurs.
KEVIN DELANEY
A robotic torso from “Terminator 3”: Some fear robots could one day rule. / MARISSA ROTH FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
