Software Testing Blog

Most bugs are never so terrible that they call into question the very nature of causality in the universe.  But for engineers working on the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, it may be necessary to rethink their assumptions about cause and effect.

For those who don’t know, the LHC will soon become the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world.  Using 180 megawatts of power, the LHC will propel two subatomic particles at 99.9999991% the speed of light around a 27 kilometer tunnel that passes underneath the borders of both France and Switzerland.  Once the particles reach full speed – making the round trip through the tunnel 11,000 times per second - they will slam into each other with a combined output of 14 TeV of energy.

The goal of all this destruction: to find the Higgs Boson.  Physicists have been chasing the Higgs for decades, but it has always remained elusive.  Now, two physicists are speculating that there’s a reason the Higgs hasn’t been found – it could be so abhorrent to nature that finding it would end the world as we know it.  If that were true, then from our point of view any attempt to find the Higgs would end in a series of bizarre failures – almost like the experiments were sabotaging themselves from the future.  Oh, and the LHC has certainly experienced its fair share of bizarre failures.  Originally planned to begin testing in 2007, it is now scheduled to start-up in November of this year.

So the next time you’re testing software, be thankful your bugs aren’t bad enough to rip apart the fabric of space time.  Or else you too might have to deal with bugs from the future!!!!