Spooky Signals from the Future Telling Us to Cancel the LHC!

A recent essay in the New York Times by Dennis Overbye has managed to attract quite a bit of attention around the internets -- most of it not very positive. It concerns a recent paper by Holger Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya (and some earlier work) discussing a seemingly crazy-sounding proposal -- that we should randomly choose a card from a million-card deck and, on the basis of which card we get, decide whether to go forward with the Large Hadron Collider. Responses have ranged from eye-rolling and heavy sighs to cries of outrage, clutching at pearls, and grim warnings that the postmodernists have finally infiltrated the scientific/journalistic establishment, this could be the straw that breaks the back of the Enlightenment camel, and worse. Since I am quoted (in a rather non-committal way) in the essay, it's my responsibility to dig into the papers and report back. And my message is: ...