Are these people serious?

[fgnord]

I think this qualifies as mind candy for nerds. These physicists are actually proposing a card game to test time travel. After a series of mishaps and a long dry spell in the way of interesting discoveries in particle physics, the largest particle collider in the world (the LHC) is slated to turn on next year at a cost of something like $5 billion. These people are speculating that the reason for the recent mishaps and lack of discoveries could be some kind of time traveling phenomena - that in some way the future is preventing us from making a discovery. In which case, there might be a terrible accident to stop the LHC from making the forbidden discovery ... whatever it is (specifically, they are using the model that a future particle is created that somehow goes back and prevents its own creation). As I understand their argument, they are proposing we decide whether to turn on the LHC based on the outcome of their card game. They would set it up so that the chances of randomly getting the result that you aren't allowed to turn the LHC on is essentially zero. But that way if their theory is right, the future can just manipulate the card game instead of causing an LHC accident, in which case they've saved billions of dollars, and possibly lives.

I have never seen such a bizarre paper ... but I guess I can't think of anything wrong with the basic idea. Sometimes the best thing to do is just shrug and go eat some ice cream. I think I'll do that.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/0707.1919