Hadron Made Safe by Time Traveller

Geneva, 17th November 2034 --- Professor Naithkin from the University of Geneva has today confirmed that he has used his time machine to make the Hadron Collider safe.

In an exclusive interview to Check25 News, just outside the Hadron Theme Park, he explained how the site of the world’s largest children’s playground used to house the underground “Hadron Collider”, a massively expensive piece of equipment that was never used, and that led to the now popular children's rhyme, “The biggest roundest whitest elephant in the world.”

It was a journey forward in time that first alerted him to the problem with the Collider. "I had travelled to the year 2037,” the Professor explained. “The streets were much the same as now, and of course I had no problem finding my way round. Everything seemed completely normal, except for one thing: I went to the newsagents and bought a paper, but I found that I was seeing two alternative newspapers at the same time - like I was in two dimensions simultaneously. It's difficult to explain. The text was the same; everything was the same - just double.

“Anyway, a while later I got back in my machine, and decided to go ahead another few years. I got to 2042, and immediately wished I hadn't. It was really quite disturbing. This time, it was like the whole world was double, like transparencies on top of each other. At the same time I was walking along the street, I was also walking along barren desert. And the most disconcerting thing for me was, when I looked down at my feet, I could only see one pair of legs. When I kicked a Coke can on the pavement, it rolled into the gutter; but when I tried to kick up some of the sand, in the desert world, nothing happened at all. I realised I was seeing two parallel universes for the year 2037: in one, Geneva was still here and I was walking in it; and in the other, Geneva was gone, replaced by desert, and I didn’t exist."

The Professor went on to explain how he calculated that it was the famous Hadron Collider that had caused the dual universes to be created. “I decided to go back, slowly, until I reached the day when there was no parallelism to be found - and that turned out to be more than 25 years ago, in 2008. I checked the newspaper for the day, and that was the day they were planning to switch on the Hadron Collider.

“I realised I had to do something, but I knew I had to be careful, not to cause any event that would impact on the present. The nice thing was, having seen that there were two such universes, I knew that I was going to succeed (or rather, that I had already succeeded!).

"So anyway, I travelled back a bit further, to August 2008, which was a few weeks before the switch-on was planned. I managed to get in, using an invisicloak. Luckily it hadn’t been invented then, so there were no security systems in place to detect one using it, and I was able to slip in very easily. Anyway, I just played around with the electro magnets a little! That obviously worked, as it broke down after just a few days, as we all knew it had done (or would do)...

“I came back to our time (2034), but found to my horror there was still a dualism of some kind, not as strong as before, but it was still there. I checked the papers, and it seemed this new smaller parallel universe was based on an attempt to start it up again at the end of 2009. So, I went back again, this time to exactly 25 years ago, to 17th November 2009. I put on my invisicloak again, took a bag of termites, and some auto-freeze fluid, and once inside, I ... errrm ... distributed it around the place, taking care to keep it all well hidden."

Would he tell us exactly what he had done, and where he had done his act of sabotage?

"No, I'd better not, had I? You never know, do you? Maybe someone from 2009 will turn up here with a time machine, and report my act to theHadron scientists! Then where would we be?”

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