Year Zero

AS YOU may have heard, this will be the year. The Large Hadron Collider - the most powerful atom-smasher ever built - will be switched on, and particle physics will hit pay-dirt. Yet if a pair of Russian mathematicians are right, any advances in this area could be overshadowed by a truly extraordinary event. According to Irina Aref'eva and Igor Volovich, the LHC might just turn out to be the world's first time machine.

It is a highly speculative claim, that's for sure. But if Aref'eva and Volovich are correct, the LHC's debut at CERN, the European particle physics centre near Geneva in Switzerland, could provide a landmark in history. That's because travelling into the past is only possible - if it is possible at all - as far back as the creation of the first time machine, and that means 2008 could become Year Zero: a must-see for the discerning time traveller.

Aref'eva and Volovich are sensible and well-respected mathematicians, based at the Steklov Mathematical Institute in Moscow, so they are not actually suggesting that visitors from the future are imminent. What they are saying is that since causality - the idea that effect must follow cause - is one of the most fundamental principles of physics, the notion that it might be tested at the LHC is worth pushing as far as possible. Their work has yet to be recognised by a peer-reviewed journal, but that hasn't stopped some other physicists from taking a keen interest.

For decades, physicists have strived to come up with plausible mechanisms for time travel. Our best description of how space and time behave comes from Einstein's general theory of relativity, so researchers have been looking for some flaw in it - or some as yet unappreciated aspect - in the hope that this might do the trick. The time machine blueprints flowing from such endeavours have never got off the drawing board, but with the LHC we might have finally done it, albeit accidentally.