A big thanks to Gavin for pointing us all to that truly entertaining read in the NYT, and the much better, and way more entertaining, original discussion by Tommaso Dorigo. You can find his latest post, and links to further discussion here.
The scary thing is, that the article that is behind this all is now not just on ArXiv, it even got published in International Journal of Modern Physics A… A story like that would fit much better onto the SciFi bookshelf. Actually, there already are stories like that out there. Ever wondered what really killed the SSC? Read “Einsteins Bridge” by John Cramer, a physics professor from Seattle who is working with the STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. The story is a very entertaining read, in particular if you’ve already seen CERN and other labs, know what a particle physics control room looks like and so on… And it also involves time travel, an alien killer race… But the best thing: It is clearly labeled as fiction, which some other things also should be.