Why There is a Process Known as “Peer-Review”…

… or alternatively titled, “How to Destroy Your Career in One Essay” by Holger Bech Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya who claim that the Large Hadron Collider is being jinxed from the future to save the world… that or God. You know: one or the other. Take your pick.

Nielsen and Ninomiya claim in their paper The Search for Effect of Influence from Future in Large Hadron Collider that “the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveller who goes back in time to kill his grandfather”.

They also conjecture whether God may have shut down the Collider to keep it from discovering the elusive Higg’s Boson, or “God particle”. Neilsen says, “It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck. [God] rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”

This reminds me of a Karl Marx quote:

Philosophy is to reality as masturbation is to sex

Except in this case we can insert “Nielsen and Ninomiya’s thesis” for philosophy, and “ridiculous crap” for everything else in the sentence.

I wonder how well their methodology would play out in the biblical studies discipline?

What affected the Chronicler’s theology? A counter theology was so abhorrent it rippled through time causing him to change the story.

Why JEDP? All theories of one author shall have bad luck. God attempts to avoid them.

How many authors are there in Isaiah? There is only one, but he traveled back in time from after the exile to during the exile, and finally, to before the exile. His writings from these three time-traveling episodes is what makes it appear as if there is more than one author for the book.

Somehow I imagine that the time-traveler or God card wouldn’t get me very far in many of my academic papers, or would be rewarded with a favorable grade.

And that’s why you always have a peer review your work before submission… just in case something like this makes sense to you during a late-night writing session.

Or you could have a blog. You know: one or the other. Take your pick.

News articles on the silliness: HERE and HERE