I got a nice mention in the Observer yesterday, in a review of the George Lamb Show on 6 Music. When you do these things, you forget someone might be listening, let alone that someone might be reviewing it.
Anyway, gratifyingly, Miranda Sawyer says George has “interesting guests”, I am the “regular clever bloke”, and I was “fascinating” when talking about the Large Hadron Collider:
“According to Brooks, one of the reasons why the LHC might keep going wrong is because time travel is too problematic to be allowed and someone/thing from the future is coming back to stop the collider working and save us all from broaching the space-time continuum. Yeah!”
Just wanted to throw in a note of clarification. Before any of the world’s physicists turn on me (again) I wasn’t quite saying that. I was saying that a couple of quite respectable physicists have suggested it. It’s appealing, especially when a couple of Russian mathematicians have suggested that the LHC could rip holes in spacetime and allow time travellers from the future to visit. But if that seems far-fetched (fun, though, huh?!), the new idea is just plain crazy. They seem to have forgotten Occam’s razor: the simplest explanation is usually the right one. And when you know that a couple of solder joints are the cause of the failure, there’s no need to invoke interference from the future.
The LHC is due to start up again in mid-November. If it fails for some inexplicable reason, then maybe we can invoke Stephen Hawking’s Time Cops. But until then…
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