Fate and the Collider

In the science section of today's online issue of the New York Times, there is an essay by Dennis Overbye called "The Collider, the Particle and a Theory about Fate".

Here, he explains a hypothesis put forth by two physicists, a hypothesis, in my opinion, which is outrageous, ridiculous, elegant and beautiful at the same time.
Let me try to put it back here on paper, without seeming like I'm regurgitating Overbye.

The Large Hadron Collider was completed on 10th October 2008. 9 days later, it sputtered to a stop because of a malfunction in its superconductors. Apparently, there was a soldering error.
The error was big enough that it has taken more than a year to repair. The Collider is expected to be back in business in December of this year.

One of the main purposes of the Collider was to isolate something called a Higg's boson. I don't know what that is, and Wikipedia does not explain things in an easy enough manner. What I do know is that a boson is named after Bose- our own, Bangla, Satyendranath Bose (A story for another time: the overt racism of the Nobel committee in not awarding him a prize). There are many types of bosons (whatever they are) and one such boson is called a Higg's boson. It is, of course, only theoretically postulated to exist. Higg's boson is the particle that is expected to give all elements their mass. Without a boson, protons and neutrons won't have mass, which means nothing else in the universe will. Strange, no?

Now for the crazy and wonderful theory: two physicists, Holger Nielson and Masao Ninomiya, have put forth the idea that to make a Higg's boson might be so against the very nature of errr... Nature, that its creation might trigger a backward wave of events that prevent its creation. Huh?

They postulate that it may just be so unnatural for a Higg's boson to be isolated that events will arrange themselves so that it may not be isolated.

Case in point: the October 19th Collider malfunction.
Another case in point: the dismantling of the US Superconducting Supercollider (also designed to find the Higg's boson), despite the fact that billions of dollars had already poured into that project.

See what I mean by ridiculous, yet beautiful hypothesis?

The thing is, there's no way you can prove it for the satisfaction of all. You can only disprove it.... or perhaps you cannot.

A reference to the original essay that prompted this entry: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/science/space/13lhc.html?ref=science