Baguette-toting bird stalls atom smasher

[n2doc]

Posted: 05:31 PM ET
This is too weird: A bird reportedly has dropped a "bit of baguette" onto the world's largest atom smasher, causing the machine to short out for a period of time.

It's just the latest mishap for the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, which scientists plan to use to get insight into the universe's origins. The LHC, which has a 17-mile track to circulate protons and is located underground on the French-Swiss border outside Geneva, Switzerland, is the largest particle accelerator in the world and cost about $10 billion.

The LHC booted up in September 2008, but technical problems forced it to shut down shortly after its launch. When the mystery bird reportedly dropped a piece of bread onto the particle accelerator's outdoor machinery earlier this week, the device was not turned on, according to reports, and therefore did not suffer major damage.

Had the machine been activated, the baguette incident could have caused the LHC to go into shutdown mode, the UK's The Register reports. The Register quotes Dr. Mike Lamont, a worker at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (or CERN), as saying that "a bit of baguette" had been dropped on the LHC, possibly by a bird.

more:

http://scitech.blogs.cnn.com/2009/11/06/baguette-toting-bird-stalls-atom-smasher/

[lumberjack_jeff]

1. Brought down by a piece of bread?

Built by Renault, no doubt.

[XemaSab]

2. This is the one that they think will retroactively prevent itself from creating that particle?

:o

[rucky]

3. In the future, birds evolve to be more intelligent than humans

and invent time travel, after discovering a curious machine with a baguette trapped in it.

[nadinbrzezinski]

4. Sharing my home wiht two parrots... no doubt

:-)

[MilesColtrane]

5. Yeup.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/biology_evolution/article6879293.ece

Explosions, scientists arrested for alleged terrorism, mysterious breakdowns — recently Cern’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has begun to look like the world’s most ill-fated experiment.

Is it really nothing more than bad luck or is there something weirder at work? Such speculation generally belongs to the lunatic fringe, but serious scientists have begun to suggest that the frequency of Cern’s accidents and problems is far more than a coincidence.

The LHC, they suggest, may be sabotaging itself from the future — twisting time to generate a series of scientific setbacks that will prevent the machine fulfilling its destiny.

-snip-

What Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, are suggesting is that the Higgs boson, the particle that physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be “abhorrent to nature”.

What does that mean? According to Nielsen, it means that the creation of the boson at some point in the future would then ripple backwards through time to put a stop to whatever it was that had created it in the first place.

[MilesColtrane]

6. !

[lapfog_1]

7. Must be one of Thom Hartmann's robot pigeons

sent to disrupt us from gaining some fundamental secret about the universe.

:tinfoilhat: