Is the Large Hadron Collider Being Destroyed by Malicious Forces from the Future?

It might sound far-fetched, but so does smashing protons together at light speed to recreate the conditions of the start of the universe. According to the Times, two physicists posit that the reason that the Large Hadron Collider (and, previously, its unbuilt American counterpart) keeps running into problems isn’t bad luck or shoddy workmanship. It’s that the LHC’s quest to discover the Higgs boson—a heretofore only theorized particle that scientists believe is what gives objects mass—is creating problems to keep itself from being discovered:

“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.”

This is just a really complicated way of  saying: Don’t feel bad about the near-constant delays to the LHC, CERN. There is nothing you can do to prevent your multibillion-dollar experiment from failing. Just stop looking for the Higgs boson and you can proceed as normal.