So, apparently some physicists have, in all seriousness, published a paper in which they have suggested that a time-traveling bird with a baguette is responsible for the latest problems with the Large Hadron Collider.

The Large Hadron Collider, for any non-physics types out there, is a massive particle accelerator -- the most powerful one yet created.  With it, scientists hope to probe the most mysterious workings of the subatomic world, and through the information generated, learn what happened during the first instant of time following the Big Bang.

The LHC has been plagued by problems, and its startup has been delayed repeatedly.  Each delay has cost millions of dollars, as faults are repaired, systems are reset, and each time the "on" date has been pushed back by months.  Most people, laymen and scientists alike, have thought of this as simply a string of very expensive bad luck.  However...

An article appearing in today's Yahoo! news, which you can read here, describes a paper by Bech Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya of, respectively, the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto.  In this paper, they suggest that if the "Holy Grail" of subatomic physics -- the Higgs boson, the so-called "God Particle" that is responsible for imparting mass to everything in the universe -- is produced in large numbers, it could potentially destroy the universe.  They further suggest that the universe has some sort of self-protect module, which will travel (through time, if necessary) to prevent the production of those particles.

They cite the many "inexplicable" delays which have caused the LHC to fail to meet its power-up dates.  The implication is that these are not coincidences, but are examples of the universe coming together to protect itself from annihilation.  Despite the fact that the reasons have been varied -- a loss of funding, a breakdown involving the magnets which are critical to the LHC's function, and now a piece of a baguette dropped by an errant bird onto the electric wires which caused a short and a loss of power -- they are considering this all as part of a bigger picture, in which the universe is forcing events to prevent its own destruction by the activation of the LHC.

Nielsen calls this "reverse chronological causation."  The LHC, some time in the future, will be capable of creating the Higgs boson, and this causes "ripples in time" which feed back and prevent their own formation.  He says, and this is a direct quote, "...you could explain it by saying that God... hates the Higgs and tries to avoid them."

Okay, let me make an introduction here.  Professors Nielsen and Ninomiya, meet William of Ockham.  Ockham, meet Nielsen and Ninomiya.  You may know of William of Ockham, a 14th century philosopher, for his most famous idea, now known as "Ockham's Razor;" if there are two (or more) explanations for something that both (or all) account for the known facts equally well, the simplest is the most likely to be true.  Put differently: the more ad hoc assumptions you have to make to support an argument, the more likely it is to be false.  So let's look at the two arguments, side by side.

Explanation 1:  God (however Nielsen and Ninomiya define that term,  be it a personal deity or some amorphous "force of nature" -- whatever that means) doesn't want us to make the Higgs boson, because it could seriously screw stuff up, and so God has sent backwards in time some kind of cosmic force which expresses itself as lack of funding, flaws in magnets, and time-traveling seagulls with Death Baguettes.

Explanation 2:  Lots of projects run out of funding, man-made tools sometimes break, and seagulls are notorious for dropping crap (literally and figuratively) all over the place.  The fact that all three happened to the LHC is a shame, but hey, that's life.

Which one sounds more likely to you?  I'm thinking that William's razor just sliced and diced Nielsen and Ninomiya, but I'm a little prejudiced in his direction, so I'm willing to admit for the record that weird explanations are sometimes true.

On the other hand, if there really was a message from God coming back from the future -- wouldn't it be more effective to communicate in a more unequivocal fashion?  I mean, a huge Pillar of Fire from which the words boomed out, "Hey, guys!  Stop this or you're going to seriously screw stuff up!  I mean, really!" might be a good place to start.  And if by "God" Nielsen and Ninomiya mean just some blind "force of nature" (again, whatever that means -- and you'll notice, if you read the article, that they tango around that issue so much that they should try out for "Dancing With The Stars"), then why wouldn't it work in some fashion that represents a discernible pattern?  One of my mentors in my teaching career once told me, "All of science is the search for regularities among observations."  There's no real regularity of any kind here, far as I can see.  Plus, I have to say that if I were in charge, I wouldn't trust a seagull with a baguette if the price of failure was the annihilation of the universe.  Those birds strike me as being pretty unreliable, especially when food is involved.  I would think that at least half the time they would just eat the baguette, universe be damned.

So, I'm skeptical.  It's an interesting idea, but honestly, strikes me as being more like the "temporal causality loop, coupled with a rupture in the space-time continuum" crap that Geordi LaForge was always blathering about on Star Trek: The Next Generation.  I could be wrong, of course.  If the next time they try to fire up the LHC a weasel suddenly appears inside the collider and chews through the cables, I'll be happy to eat my words.

Some of you have probably read the recent news story about a hotel owner in Taos, New Mexico who is requiring Hispanic employees to anglicize their names if they are to be allowed to work at his hotel.  (Read about it here.)

So Marcos will become Mark, Rosita will become Rose, and Carlos Charles or Charlie.  Predictably, there has been a hue and cry, directing charges of racism against the owner, Larry Whitten, who equally vehemently denies them.  He was, he claims, only trying to make patrons more comfortable, more at home, in not having to wrestle with a "foreign-sounding" name.

Well, my initial reaction is that anyone who has to "wrestle" with the pronunciation of "Marcos" is an illiterate moron, but we'll let that pass.  The deeper question is, of course, whether an employer has the right to ask an employee to hide his/her ethnicity, and whether it is right not only in the legal but in the ethical sense.

My ancestors were some of those people whose names were anglicized because of the stigma of being French.  Starting in the post-Civil-War days, when the governance and (especially) the educational system of southern Louisiana was coming more and more under the control of speakers of English, being French came increasingly to be equated with "ignorant and backward."  My mother remembered being slapped on the playground for speaking French.  My father anglicized his last name -- pronounced the French way until his generation -- to rhyme with "sonnet," and it was only my stubborn anger at what I perceived as the mauling of a proud family surname that made me go back to pronouncing it the French way.  Many of today's Louisianians who carry the names White, Chastain, and Darrow don't realize that they were originally LeBlanc, Chiasson, and Doiron.

My wife's family endured a great deal more of this kind of thing.  She is a Jew of Lithuanian and Polish descent, and saw a lot of her family names damaged virtually beyond recognition - Serejski became Seares, Bialystozki became Bailes, Skawronek became Scavron.  People lost their names, and thereby part of their heritage, part of their birthright.

Still.  There's a small voice in me that speaks up, albeit with some trepidation, to suggest that many of these ancestors of ours welcomed that change as a sign of fitting in to their new society.  If they had somehow been made to be ashamed of their ethnicity, there was still a part of them that felt that the more important thing was to become a part of the society they had joined, to make a better life for themselves and their children.  I'm reminded of the joke...

Mrs. Hirshowitz, newly accepted into the local bridge club, is chatting after a rousing game of cards with some of her new-found high society friends.

Mrs. Uppington-Smythe says, "Yes, well,  you know, Archibald and I are going to Europe this summer."  She turns to Mrs. Hirshowitz, and says, with a sweet smile, "I don't suppose you've been, Mrs. Hirshowitz?"

"Been there?" she replies.  "Pfft.  Who wants to go there?  My parents spent most of their lives trying to leave."

So, I guess, it depends on your perspective.  I doubt, however, that Mr. Whitten, the hotel owner, had any such high-flown sentiments in mind, and it's hard not to pin the epithet of "racist" on his lapel.  I would be interested, however, to see what my French-speaking grandparents would have thought of the whole incident.  They'd clawed their way up from poverty in the swamp country south of New Orleans, and I rather suspect that if I told my grandpa about the response of the Hispanic employees of the Taos hotel, he'd have chewed on the stem of his pipe for a moment, and then said, "You know, far as I care, they could call me George Washington if I got regular hours, decent working conditions, and benefits."