Friday, November 6, 2009

Baguette Dropped From Bird's Beak Shuts Down The Large Hadron Collider (Really) | Popular Science

This is getting freaky.
Baguette Dropped From Bird's Beak Shuts Down The Large Hadron Collider (Really) | Popular Science: "The Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, just cannot catch a break. First, a coolant leak destroyed some of the magnets that guide the energy beam. Then LHC officials postponed the restart of the machine to add additional safety features. Now, a bird dropping a piece of bread on a section of the accelerator has, according to the Register, shut down the whole operation.
The 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."
I say freaky because some otherwise suspected physicists have a theory about the startup:
“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.”
Seriously.

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