IF SOME Russian mathematicians are right, then 2008 will be a year to remember. Extraordinary as it sounds, this could be when humanity unwittingly creates its first time machine and we receive our first visitors from the future - presumably wearing, as future-fashion dictates, silver jumpsuits and driving flying cars.
These theorists speculate that at the much-delayed opening of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN on the French-Swiss border, the assembled scientists and dignitaries may be treated to a big surprise. The LHC could, thanks to some mooted possibilities crashing around on the wilder shores of physics, become a time machine - specifically, the end of a "closed timelike curve" connected to the future (see "The accidental time machine").
This is not the first time we have been told that the LHC could change, or rather end, life as we know it. A few years ago ...
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