"Large Hadron Collider scuttled by birdy baguette-bomber"

Cern Lhc T2030Shigh
The God machine just can't catch a break...

A bird dropping a piece of bread onto outdoor machinery has been blamed for a technical fault at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) this week which saw significant overheating in sections of the mighty particle-punisher's subterranean 27-km supercooled magnetic doughnut.

According to scientists at the project, had the LHC been operational - it is scheduled to recommence beaming later this month - the snag would have caused it to fail safe and shut down automatically. This would put the mighty machine out of action for a few days while it was restarted, but there would be no repeat of the catastrophic damage suffered last September. On that occasion, an electrical connection in the circuit itself failed violently, causing a massive liquid-helium leak and knock-on damage along hundreds of metres of magnets.

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Comments

Oldest comments listed first.

Posted by: ErraticMinds on November 5, 2009 at 1:00 PM

This has got to be the most unlucky experiment set-up ever


Posted by: Jack Dubious on November 5, 2009 at 1:57 PM

Nature itself is trying to stop this abomination before it destroys the universe as we know it.


Posted by: Alan on November 5, 2009 at 3:41 PM

Once we figure out that nature will do anything to prevent a Higgs boson from being created we may be able to make an improbability drive. And from there it is a short skip and a hop to an infinite improbability drive.

The first thing I am going to do with my infinite improbability drive is calculate the chance that someone would have written about the IID in a work of science fiction last century so that we will be able to invent it more quickly from the FID.


Posted by: Greg Nagy on November 6, 2009 at 5:04 AM

The work of Science Fiction

So what they are saying is that this particle beam generating and focusing device with the capability to destroy planets was taken out of service because of an unshielded exhaust port less than 2 meters wide, more or less.


Posted by: william larsen on November 6, 2009 at 8:42 AM

this is a serious project,not a crackpot doomsday machine.it should get more respect.


Posted by: johnfranklin on November 6, 2009 at 10:03 AM

ever heard the saying "the devil is in the details?" well, there are a lot of details to this LHC. I'm not one of those religious fanatics, but if legit scientists are talking about "sabotage from the future" I think there are a lot of scary potential for at least the imagination. http://bit.ly/4hCaOs


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