Who is to blame for your failures? Are they a result of the decisions you’ve made? External forces beyond your control? Or could it be a future so afraid of your success destroying the universe that it comes back to stop you from succeeding?
Scientists are blaming their failures on the Large Hadron Collider project on the “future” according to an article in the New York Times by Dennis Overbye:
“More than a year after an explosion of sparks, soot and frigid helium shut it down, the world’s biggest and most expensive physics experiment, known as the Large Hadron Collider, is poised to start up again. In December, if all goes well, protons will start smashing together in an underground racetrack outside Geneva in a search for forces and particles that reigned during the first trillionth of a second of the Big Bang.
Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No, I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.”
Impossible science courtesy of Hollywood’s Marty McFly (Back to the Future) and John Connor (Terminator)!
I’m a bit of a nerd and think it’s a pretty interesting experiment (though the notion of a “God particle” is ridiculous). And while these scientists have bigger brains for than I do, I have to wonder if they’re setting a dangerous precedent.
If you’ve lost your job and are struggling to find one in our current economic client, is that a function of the future? Has time somehow worked its way backwards to sabotage your career?
Imagine you’re in a job interview and asked why you were let go from your last job. Your answer: “The future sabotaged that job just so you could hire me for this one.” I don’t recommend that approach!
There are lots of possibilities, but I think if I were you I’d take a more traditional approach. Maybe you should look at your past and see what you can learn from your prior successes and failures. Maybe you should look at your present and determine what you need to be doing right now to get the results you want.
Can your future determine your present? Normally we’d say no. But I’m wondering if perhaps it can. Do you have a vision of the future you would like to create? If you don’t you can only get there by accident.
So go build yourself a time machine. Get to the future you desire by working hard today–with goals in hand–to get to where you want to be tomorrow.
Particle physics aside, that’s the only way to get there!
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