It was weird enough that scientists said a bird dropping a piece of bread on an electrical substation managed to shut down power to the Large Hadron Collider. Now two respected physicists are blaming that incident on a time-traveling bird, which was said to thwart the collider's mission of finding the Higgs boson, a particle thought to be the building block that gives everything in the universe its mass.

Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto theorize that there's something so dangerous about the collider, time travelers are coming back to 2009 and sabotaging the experiment. They're calling it "reverse chronological causation." That's right folks, it's a bird, flying right out of the Time Tunnel, saving the universe. Or could future life forms be trying to keep us from traveling to the stars?

Come to think of it, every time scientists try to capture the illusive Higgs boson, there are inexplicable failures. Twice, in 1993 and 2000, funding suddenly dried up for two separate projects. And then this Large Hadron Collider has had a series of setbacks, including one incident where a physicist was accused of terrorist activity.

So what do we do, wait around until thousands of years from now to finally find out if there really is something horribly dangerous about finding the Higgs boson? Or should we go on about our business, innocently trying to stumble upon the secrets of the building blocks of the universe? Note to future humans: if you're saving us from doomsday, thanks.

Via Time