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Word: ninomiya (lookup in dictionary) (lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
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...returned. Physicists have a new theory regarding the Large Hadron Collider—and contrary to your initial suspicions, it has less to do with particles and more to do with destiny. According to renowned scientists Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya, of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, perhaps free will is not as scientifically sound a concept as our modern philosophy so makes...

Author: By Shaomin C. Chew | Title: The Fate of Science | 12/7/2009 | See Source »

While most scientists would write off the event as a freak accident, two esteemed physicists have formulated a theory that suggests an alternative explanation: perhaps a time-traveling bird was sent from the future to sabotage the experiment. Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, have published several papers over the past year arguing that the CERN experiment may be the latest in a series of physics research projects whose purposes are so unacceptable to the universe that they are doomed to fail, subverted...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Did a Time-Traveling Bird Sabotage the Collider? | 11/11/2009 | See Source »

...series of audacious papers, Nielsen and Ninomiya have suggested that setbacks to the LHC occur because of "reverse chronological causation," which is to say, sabotage from the future. The papers suggest that the Higgs boson may be "abhorrent to nature" and the LHC's creation of the Higgs sometime in the future sends ripples backward through time to scupper its own creation. Each time scientists are on the verge of capturing the Higgs, the theory holds, the future intercedes. The theory as to why the universe rejects the creation of Higgs bosons is based on complex mathematics, but, Nielsen tells...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Did a Time-Traveling Bird Sabotage the Collider? | 11/11/2009 | See Source »

Many physicists say that Nielsen and Ninomiya's theory, while intellectually interesting, cannot be accurate because the event that the LHC is trying to recreate already happens in nature. Particle collisions of an energy equivalent to those planned in the LHC occur when high-energy cosmic rays collide with the earth's atmosphere. What's more, some scientists believe that the Tevatron accelerator at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (or Fermilab) near Chicago has already created Higgs bosons without incident; the Fermilab scientists are now refining data from their collisions to prove the Higgs' existence. (See the top 10 scientific discoveries...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Did a Time-Traveling Bird Sabotage the Collider? | 11/11/2009 | See Source »

Nielsen and Ninomiya's theory represents one side of an intellectual divide between particle physicists today. Contemporary physicists tend to fall into one of two camps: the theorists, who posit ideas about the origins and workings of the universe; and experimentalists, who design telescopes and particle accelerators to test these theories, or provide new data from which novel theories can emerge. Most experimentalists believe that the theorists, due to a lack of new data in recent years, have reached a roadblock - the Standard Model, which is the closest thing the theorists have to an evidence-backed "theory of everything," provides...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Did a Time-Traveling Bird Sabotage the Collider? | 11/11/2009 | See Source »

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