In truly French fashion, the Large Hadron Collider has shut down by… a baguette. Zut alors!
According to Popular Science:
[A] bird dropped some bread on a section of outdoor machinery, eventually leading to significant over heating in parts of the accelerator. The LHC was not operational at the time of the incident, but the spike produced so much heat that had the beam been on, automatic failsafes would have shut down the machine.
The overheating shouldn’t postpone the LHC’s reactivation at the end of the month, but all the delays and mishaps are adding to our paranoid, sci-fi suspicion: Is the LHC being sabotaged from the future? See this Cosmic Variance post for an authoritative take on such a possibility.
Related Content:
Discoblog: LHC Collisions to Commence Next Week…Hopefully
Discoblog: You Say Large Hadron Collider, I Say Sizeable Particle Crasher
Discoblog: While LHC Scientists Were Drinking Champagne, Hackers Were Attacking
Cosmic Variance: Spooky Signals from the Future Telling Us to Cancel the LHC!
Image: CERN
November 6th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
A baguette? Clearly this was the work of the French!
November 6th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
Grrrrr, I knew it! Now the future is sending BIRDS through their time machines to sabotage the LHC.
That’s it. That’s the last straw. I’m taking the batteries out of all my clocks and watches. Let’s see the future try to get here NOW! HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!
November 7th, 2009 at 2:16 am
Tweet Tweet;-)
November 7th, 2009 at 2:35 am
Some things like that happen, huh? Just a bad day… oh well, tomorrow may be better…
November 8th, 2009 at 9:01 pm
What if the bird dropping the sandwich was guided by a spirit from the past (”Nostradamus redivivus”), not from the future? Nostradamus left several warnings, indicating that the “projected” future can be changed to another variant, including the following in “Les Propheties” (publisher Rosne, a Lyon, 1557, verse IX-44), in Old French:
“Migrez, migrez de Geneue trestous,
“Saturne d’or en fer se changera,
“Le contre RAY POZ exterminera tous,
“Avant l’advent le Ciel signes fera.”
My translation, published in my book “Dr. M. Nostradamus…” already in 1985 (hard-cover edition, Studeophile, Chicago) and again in 1988 (Morkunas Printing Co., Chicago, ISBN 0-933569-00-9), pp. 423-427, long before the LHC was built in Geneva, is (with my comments in parentheses):
IX-44 “Leave, leave Geneva all!…
“Saturn of gold (nuclei in the target) will be transmuted to iron (by the Higgs boson that they are trying to produce),
“The (target) opposite to the positive ray (RAYON POSITIF, the accelerated protons with a positive charge) will exterminate all,
“Before the coming (of the end) the sky will show signs.”
About the generation of “a pocket universe” (another, but miniature “Big Bang”) in the laboratory, Alan H. Guth, the principal author of the inflationary theory of many universes, writes (”The Inflationary Universe”, Perseus, Reading, MA, 1997, pp. 254, 263):
“… a patch of false vacuum 10 exp. -26 centimeters across is all the recipe demands… the time it takes the child universe to disconnect is roughly 10 exp. -37 seconds… It would disappear in roughly 10 exp. -23 seconds [i.e., extremely rapidly], releasing the energy equivalent of a 500 kiloton nuclear explosion.” This is “only” 17 times the energy of the nuclear bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945. But where is a guarantee that the false vacuum (if and when indeed generated) would stop growing so fast?! Of course, the scientists at the LHC will say that the energy of the accelerated protons will be much too small to shrink any of them to the required tiny patch for the false vacuum, but — who knows? The Higgs boson, “the father” of all particles, if ever formed artificially (as it existed after the “Big Bang”), may generate additional energy by initiating nuclear reactions in the target (sometimes gold is indeed used, as predicted in IX-44). The product, iron nuclei, have the lowest energy. That is why the nuclear reactions in the stars end up with iron as the final product. But we don’t want a miniature star on the Earth!
The LHC scientists even could not protect their most sensitive equipment from a heroic bird! Read all about it in the books I mentioned!
November 9th, 2009 at 12:42 am
So many what ifs…..how does anyone know that a bird dropped the bagel
And has any kind of small holed cover been installed since the bagel was dropped?
Just asking.
November 9th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
it was nature’s call to LHC thru nature call to the bird.
November 20th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
like the destruction of the deathstar