Bird with baguette almost destroys the LHC

[BlackCat]

Well, maybe a minor exaggeration - though, proves that Murphy strikes in strange ways

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2009-11/bread-loving-bird-shuts-down-lhc

Baguette Dropped From Bird's Beak Shuts Down The Large Hadron Collider (Really)
By Stuart Fox Posted 11.05.2009 at 11:09 am 40 Comments

The Baguette Incident: Re-enacted according to eyewitness accounts. CERN; Bird via Foxypar4/Flickr
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.

This incident won't delay the reactivation of the facility later this month, but exposes yet another vulnerability of the what might be the most complex machine ever built. With freak accident after freak accident piling up over at CERN, the idea of time traveling particles returning from the future to prevent their own discovery is beginning to seem less and less far fetched.

[Winston]

So at least we now have a fully functional Baguette Collider.

[Wezil]

I'm questioning the authenticity of this article.

Could the bird carry the baguette? Was that an African or European bird?

[BlackCat]

I'm questioning the authenticity of this article.

Could the bird carry the baguette? Was that an African or European bird?

http://user.web.cern.ch/user/news/2009/091106b.html

No mention of bird type though.

[Harry Tuttle]

What if it was a swallow?

[Lord Avalon]

Goddam French bread

[Space05us]

The bird dropped some bread on a section of outdoor machinery, eventually leading to significant over heating in parts of the accelerator.

Really?

[The Mad Monk]

You would think somebody could remember to put the access panels back on...

[The Mad Monk]

I mean, I hope somebody left the panels off. I'd hate to think that the LHC was so poorly designed as to leave electrical connections exposed to the elements.

I mean what's next? Unsecured thermal exhaust ports on the Death Star?

[BeBMan]

http://www.themovieblog.com/2008/03/death-star-destruction-conspiracy-theory

7) Why has their been no investigation into evidence that the droids who provided the rebels with the Death Star plans were once owned by none other than Lord Vader himself, and were found, conveniently, by the pilot who destroyed the Death Star, and who is also believed to be Lord Vader’s son? Evidence also shows that the droids were brought to one Ben Kenobi, who, records indicate, was Darth Vader’s teacher many years earlier! Are all these personal connections between the conspirators and a key figure in the Imperial government supposed to be coincidences?

[Saras]

It's the future people trying to prevent higgs bosons.

[loinburger]

The people in the future are worried that we'll build the LHC and use it to travel through time and steal their chicks.

[The Mad Monk]

Times Topics: Large Hadron Collider

Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No, I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. 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.

Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, put this idea forward in a series of papers with titles like “Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal” and “Search for Future Influence From LHC,” posted on the physics Web site arXiv.org in the last year and a half.

According to the so-called Standard Model that rules almost all physics, the Higgs is responsible for imbuing other elementary particles with mass.

“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail message. In an unpublished essay, Dr. Nielson said of the theory, “Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.” It is their guess, he went on, “that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”

This malign influence from the future, they argue, could explain why the United States Superconducting Supercollider, also designed to find the Higgs, was canceled in 1993 after billions of dollars had already been spent, an event so unlikely that Dr. Nielsen calls it an “anti-miracle.”

You might think that the appearance of this theory is further proof that people have had ample time — perhaps too much time — to think about what will come out of the collider, which has been 15 years and $9 billion in the making.

The collider was built by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, to accelerate protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts around an 18-mile underground racetrack and then crash them together into primordial fireballs.

For the record, as of the middle of September, CERN engineers hope to begin to collide protons at the so-called injection energy of 450 billion electron volts in December and then ramp up the energy until the protons have 3.5 trillion electron volts of energy apiece and then, after a short Christmas break, real physics can begin.

Maybe.

Dr. Nielsen and Dr. Ninomiya started laying out their case for doom in the spring of 2008. It was later that fall, of course, after the CERN collider was turned on, that a connection between two magnets vaporized, shutting down the collider for more than a year.

Dr. Nielsen called that “a funny thing that could make us to believe in the theory of ours.”

He agreed that skepticism would be in order. After all, most big science projects, including the Hubble Space Telescope, have gone through a period of seeming jinxed. At CERN, the beat goes on: Last weekend the French police arrested a particle physicist who works on one of the collider experiments, on suspicion of conspiracy with a North African wing of Al Qaeda.

Dr. Nielsen and Dr. Ninomiya have proposed a kind of test: that CERN engage in a game of chance, a “card-drawing” exercise using perhaps a random-number generator, in order to discern bad luck from the future. If the outcome was sufficiently unlikely, say drawing the one spade in a deck with 100 million hearts, the machine would either not run at all, or only at low energies unlikely to find the Higgs.

Sure, it’s crazy, and CERN should not and is not about to mortgage its investment to a coin toss. The theory was greeted on some blogs with comparisons to Harry Potter. But craziness has a fine history in a physics that talks routinely about cats being dead and alive at the same time and about anti-gravity puffing out the universe.

As Niels Bohr, Dr. Nielsen’s late countryman and one of the founders of quantum theory, once told a colleague: “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”

Dr. Nielsen is well-qualified in this tradition. He is known in physics as one of the founders of string theory and a deep and original thinker, “one of those extremely smart people that is willing to chase crazy ideas pretty far,” in the words of Sean Carroll, a Caltech physicist and author of a coming book about time, “From Eternity to Here.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/science/space/13lhc.html?_r=1&em

[Space05us]

No, I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future.

Maybe this has some weight to it, though not in a silly fantasy way. It's possible that someone who works on the LHC doesn't want it to work. Perhaps they really fear that something dangerous will come of it, or they fear that nothing at all will come of it.

[Drake Tungsten]

Large Hadron Collider: Damaged by a Time-Traveling Bird?

Unbelievable!