"That Seagull Looks an Awful Lot Like Columbo."

That's what I said today while sitting with Maia on the SF Ferry Building's dockside benches and staring at a very Peter Falk-ish seagull. Just about the only thing it has in common with what I want to write about today is how batshit it is.

There's only one thing more surrealistic than that in the news at the moment (that I know of, at least) and it's the recent release of jointly published essays by Holger Bech Nielsen of the Neils Bohr Institute and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics that are causing equal parts head scratching, serious contemplation and laughter from the physics community. It concerns the Large Hadron Collider at CERN--you know, that giant high energy torus buried under the Franco-Swiss border that's supposed to destroy all life on Earth?--as well as other devices that may have had the potential to find the elusive Higgs boson and can be reduced to this hypothesis: the Higgs boson, or discovery of it, is so abhorrent to the universe that it will cause ripples backwards in time to strike any device capable of finding it with extreme back luck. Reverse bad luck time travel. Spicy!

Personally, my first reaction was to do a slow face palm and softly weep for the field of theoretical physics, which seems to be getting its theories from Stan Lee. After reading a bit more about their strange theory though the WTF-factor steadily decreased to the point where I can at least see what they're stabbing at, even if it remains the stuff of sci-fi. One can't help notice how the all efforts to spot the Higgs have been met with resistance: the Superconducting Super Collider planned for the Dallas-Ft. Worth area was cancelled after billions were spent on it; the LHC itself was placed offline after an equipment failure sidelined it for a year; and again at the LHC an employee's supposed connection with Al Qaeda may further delay the program. One might say the factor linking all three, plus any other efforts to catch a glimpse of the Higgs, is bad luck.

Still, I don't buy it. It's all circumstantial for one, but also too much like anthropomorphizing the universe, insinuating that it's got the brains enough to sabotage very specific pieces of equipment or place suspicious persons in sensitive positions. What's more likely is that the SSC was cancelled because it was projected to be massively overbudget, and that the LHC is just going through some quirks because it is the most complex and powerful machine ever built by mankind. It would be more amazing if something that intricate didn't go wrong somewhere.

It stands to reason that someday the boffins will get the LHC up and running, but until then I have more important things to concern myself with other than time travelling forces of bad luck. After all, there are plenty of seagulls out there, maybe ones that resemble Angela Lansbury or even Andy Griffith. Hot diggidy damn!

--Matt