As CERN prepared to switch on the Large Hadron Collider last year, the prospect of pushing back the frontiers of physics was not the only reason for fevered anticipation. There was also the small matter of the end of the world.

The powerful particle smasher, it was claimed, could potentially create a black hole that would devour the planet. Though the notion was always fanciful, it led to a lawsuit seeking to shut the LHC down, and right up until “Big Bang Day” CERN scientists had to field tearful phone calls pleading with them not to push the button.

These fears have melted away, only to be topped by a still stranger concern that makes black hole oblivion look like the height of reason. The latest claim is that, as the New York Times put it, the LHC is being “sabotaged by its own future”.

The idea, proposed by Holger Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya, of Kyoto University, is that the Higgs boson — the “God particle” that the collider is trying to discover — is in some sense abhorrent to nature. So grave would be the consequences of its creation that the cosmos (or God, as some would have it) is conspiring to thwart the LHC. That could explain the magnet accident, and perhaps also the cancellation of an American collider that would likewise have hunted the Higgs.

Nielsen and Ninomiya, who are reasonably mainstream physicists, have used clever maths to show that while this scenario is very unlikely, it isn’t impossible. They suggest that a card game be used to decide whether to restart the LHC. Only one card among hundreds of millions would stop the project, but if it were drawn, the collider should never be switched on.

CERN has rejected this, with good reason. For Nielsen and Ninomiya fit squarely in the tradition of physicists playing around with equations to prove that very weird things are not forbidden by nature. That doesn’t mean, of course, that they will happen — indeed, we should usually proceed as if they will not.

The whole idea rests on what the pair, in their own papers, describe as “not completely convincing” assumptions. The hypothesis is also difficult to reconcile with the fact that cosmic rays, which constantly bombard Earth, can create collisions similar to those of the LHC. Ultimately the idea is not meant to be taken that seriously: it’s a thought experiment, almost a physics in-joke.

Physicists are divided as to whether the Nielsen-Ninomiya hypothesis is intellectually justified. Sean Carroll, of Caltech, California, thinks the idea “crazy, but not crackpot, which is a distinction worth drawing”. Tomasso Dorigo, of the Italian Institute of Nuclear Physics, has a less charitable view: “It’s very sad to see some valuable minds writing such a pile of unmitigated bullshit.”

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