“Now two physicists claim in a new study that no matter how hard we try, we may never turn the LHC on at all.
The study is authored by Holger Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya, who argue that the very particles the LHC produces will prevent the accelerator from ever being used. Harvard post-doc and CERN collaborator Kevin Black relates their argument to the grandfather paradox—that a particle like the Higgs boson goes back in time and prevents its own birth (i.e. the future changes the events of the present).”
It’s not exactly quantum suicide, but a similar effect is claimed to actually reach into the past to cancel out any branch where lots of Higgs bosons are produced, as the LHC arguably will do. The prediction is that the LHC (nor any similarly powerful collider) will never successfully operate at full power, and so far it’s coming true!
Another idea along these lines is mentioned in this blog post:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2008/08/11/will-the-lhc’s-future-cancel-out-its-past/
“Now two physicists claim in a new study that no matter how hard we try, we may never turn the LHC on at all. The study is authored by Holger Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya, who argue that the very particles the LHC produces will prevent the accelerator from ever being used. Harvard post-doc and CERN collaborator Kevin Black relates their argument to the grandfather paradox—that a particle like the Higgs boson goes back in time and prevents its own birth (i.e. the future changes the events of the present).”
It’s not exactly quantum suicide, but a similar effect is claimed to actually reach into the past to cancel out any branch where lots of Higgs bosons are produced, as the LHC arguably will do. The prediction is that the LHC (nor any similarly powerful collider) will never successfully operate at full power, and so far it’s coming true!
(Original paper at http://arxiv.org/abs/0802.2991 )