A Higgs Boson Is Ruining My Life

This story is simultaneously scary-awesome and laughable. I honestly don't know which attribute will turn out to be defining.

First a little background: a Higgs boson is a hypothetical particle that is believed to be responsible for imbuing all matter with mass. It is predicted to exist by particle physics but has never been observed. It's one of the big things the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is looking for. You know about the LHC -- it's the enormous particle collider that brought about fears that turning it on might destroy the universe. Now that's how you do science.

Anyway, a couple of respected scientists are positing that the reason science has been unable thus far to detect said boson is that they themselves go back in time and prevent it. It would, they say, explain why the U.S. collider project was defunded back in 1993. They also point to problems with the LHC when it was first fired up; problems that shut it down for a year. Just recently, one of the scientists working on the project was arrested for doing jobs for al Qaeda on the side (physicists are not immune to the down economy it seems).

As far as conspiracy theories go, this one's got legs. It seems so clear to me now I don't know how I didn't see it before. It probably had something to do with not knowing what a Higgs boson was. Long story short, I think Higgs bosons have been going back in time and screwing up my life.

That time I didn't make the baseball team? Higgs boson. Maybe it got in my eyes and distracted me in the batter's box, or messed with my reflexes so I couldn't get to that ground ball. And all this time I thought it was because I was lanky and uncoordinated!

I know damn well a Higgs boson is the reason I was only runner up in the district spelling bee all those years ago. It's the only explanation for why I was asked to spell "quietus" when the winner got friggin' "triangle".

I didn't get a lot of interest from the girls in my high school. For years I thought it was because of my sullen nature and the widely held belief that I was either on drugs or perhaps crazy. Nope. Higgs boson.

I bet that lottery ticket I bought in 1997 should have been a winner. Damn you, Higgs boson!

My eyes have been opened! Nothing that goes wrong is my fault. It's all the result of sabotage by a malicious particle from the future. Right now, I bet they're plotting against me, getting ready to send an agent back to 2009 and keep me from dating Kate Beckinsale or discovering oil in my back yard.

I must say, it's liberating in a way. Nothing I do is my fault. I'm free of responsibilty for myself and my actions. This must be what people who want to expand the welfare state feel like.