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LHC Shut Down Again — By Baguette-Dropping Bird
Philip K Dickhead writes "Is Douglas Adams scripting the saga of sorrows facing the LHC? These time-traveling Higgs-Boson particles certainly exhibit the sign of his absurd sense of humor! Perhaps it is the Universe itself, conspiring against the revelations intimated by the operation of CERN's Large Hadron Collider? This time, it is not falling cranes, cracked magnets, liquid helium leaks or even links to Al Qaeda, that have halted man's efforts to understand the meaning of life, the universe and everything. It now appears that the collider is hindered from an initial firing by a baguette, dropped by a passing bird: 'The bird dropped some bread on a section of outdoor machinery, eventually leading to significant overheating 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.'"
who would have thought that deep thought ... aka LHC would have produced nothing more than a singular finite number rather than some grand unifying theory of LTUAE
OK. That proves it.
Multi-world interpretation is correct and LHC is just a variant of quantum-suicide experiment.
They should keep the women away from the scientific equipment if they can't eat their lunch responsibly!
Was it a European Swallow or an African Swallow?
I tried to think of a good sig, and this wasn't it.
Didn't anybody brief the pigeon? Perhaps it was a bird scientist?
This article gives more information
A lot of things will drop on sections "of outdoor machinery". It seems that this LHC machine has been designed in such a way that will never get a chance to work.
The bird's briefing:
The approach will not be easy. You are required to maneuver straight down this trench and skim the surface to this point. The target area is only two meters wide. It's a small thermal exhaust port, right below the main port. The shaft leads directly to the reactor system. A precise hit will start a chain reaction which should destroy the station.
One wonders how much it would take to put some kind of roofing over the most vulnerable exterior equipment. Something like corrugated tin on a steel frame or whatever.
Or maybe a roof over the cafeteria and the rubbish bins, so that birds can't just come and steal baguettes.
I've never heard of such deleterious effects of a bird dropping anything on outdoor power station switchgear ... what kind of vulnerable kit is this anyways?
SIGBUS @ NO-07.308
... and why, pray tell, was such apparently critical equipment not in some sort of enclosure?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Where's the humor tag? I kept looking for the Onion link or humor tag. I have a hard time believing this. It's gotta be joke.
The LHC was not operational at the time of the incident
and the TFA
This incident won't delay the reactivation of the facility later this month
the spike produced so much heat that had the beam been on, automatic failsafes would have shut down the machine.
And had I been there at the writing of this headline, I would have kicked his ass! ^^
Wait for the next article's headline to be: Someone Kicked Philip K Dickhead's Ass Again! (Because I bet, with that name, it happened more than once already. ;)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Hypothesis: There are multiple universes. Many of them build the LHC. In those that build it, most turn it on, destroying themselves. Not only do they destroy themselves, but they take out their planet, their galaxy, and their universe, including time, such that they essentially never existed.
Obviously we can't live in one of those universes, so a series of accidents, bizarre or mundane, probably take place until someone decides it's not worth the effort and the project is scrapped.
That would explain the long delays and the mind-bogglingly arbitrary accidents.
Alternative hypothesis: The LHC is an internationally-funded, politically-changed science experiment of immense complexity. That alone would explain the delays and problems, and would also lead to it probably never being switched on.
3rd hypothesis: The LHC is switched on eventually, gives us much scientific knowledge, and doesn't kill us all. But really, that's boring and doesn't make for compelling science fiction. Just compelled science.
The LHC requires a mission-critical specialized lubricant made from rare Peruvian wackova beans and refined on the space station, but they just used old chewing gum.
What did the seven dwarves say when they passed Snow White working on the streetcorner? Hi ho, Hi ho.
from the infinite number of parallel universes it had to happen in ours! common fate could you give our universe a break?
Can any1 explain why it's a good idea to be messing around with a machine that 'might' produce teeny-tiny black holes that 'shouldn't' cause any problems?
I'm just having a bit of trouble understanding why, exactly, this is anything but short-sighted and foolish..
Obviously, because it causes such a universal disaster, it will throw us back in time, so we must make every attempt to stop it!
And that was one of them.
Just how many of these freak accidents in a row would be necessary to provide incontrovertible proof of the "universe doensn't want us to switch LHC on" theory?
I can imagine an objective demo : once we're sure that the principle exists, there would be a special room with a red button to turn on LHC. Skeptics would be invited to attempt to press the button...
I have a rock that keeps tigers away to sell you ...
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
The LHC is designed with very good fail-safes so that random events like this won't shut down the accelerator for huge amounts of time. It would mean at most a day or two of no beam before things got started again. These kinds of safety trips are to be expected a couple of times a month with a machine as huge and complicated as the LHC.
/*No comment*/ #No comment
or parallel universe, it's just that their system was not designed with enough tolerance and redundancy, they should have expected their outdoor machinery being hitted by all kinds of things falling from the sky anyhow.
I can't decide whether I am pissed off (I was waiting for the LHC results like a little child who waits for his birthday present) or if I should burst out in laughing...
I guess I am both at the same time.
Here be signatures
What if the theories about sabotage from the future are right? It would make my small bits tingle.
The birds are in collaboration with the mice.
Please remind me. Who's paying for this piece of junk again?
And you thought the death star had stupid vulnerabilities...
Philip K Dickhead writes...
Posting things like this on the front page makes /. look very childish.
I don't care if it's someone's username. It's crass and offensive.
Timothy, you should know better.
"Hey, I have this great idea for solving your bird-baguette issues! It involves putting ferromagnetic joists over the top of your super-conducting magnets..."
whatcouldpossiblygowrong
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
This thing is going to blow up the world. I see "Big Mistake of 38" all over this one.
This is my sig.
"Red Five standing by..."
"Never attribute to a time traveling malicious Higgs boson what can easily be attributed to human stupidity."
Physicists spend too much time in the lab in theoretical situations. It's amazing that when they design a machine that will go outside, they forget that birds tend to crap on everything.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
What I don't understand is, why not run the "card" experiment? Commit to shutting down (or delayng for 30 yeas) the LHC if three one-in-a-million consecutive dice-throws turn negative. That would beat wasting so much money on a failed experiment. The chance of "false positives" would be negligibly small.
The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate
-The New York Times
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 i
http://hcc.web.cern.ch/hcc/cryo_main/cryo_main.php?region=Sector81
Pretty wild to think that a rise up to 8 kelvin is a "serious overtemp event".
(And fancy CERN having all their engineering data online like that, open to everyone..... anyone'd think they invented the internet or something.)
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
...isn't a baguette a hand bag thingy?
Or did i understand it wrongly?
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
nuff said
If it only took an X wing to blow up the Death Star via an exhaust port, surely they could have seen something like this happening when they they were building the LHC
"The bird dropped some bread on a section of outdoor machinery, eventually leading to significant over heating in parts of the accelerator."
I've seen this before. On one side we have a huge and expensive piece of machinery, bent on destroying a planet, using a high energy beam. On the other side we have our hero, cleverly dropping his projectile into the right spot, being able to cripple the machine.
...you should see the other universes!
Firehed - Unfortunately, thanks to medical breakthroughs, common sense is not as common as it once was.
I too was pretty skeptical at first but now things are starting to get spooky.
Face it, the odds are really small that this would happen. It is more likely you have a scientist who is very worried about bad things happening, and who has actually intelligently sabotaged the system by trial and error, ending up with the old baguette-on-the-busbar trick which must be a physics joke among French speaking countries.
On the other hand, if the LHC is really a universe suicide machine then there must be an uncountable number of universes which died, due to the baguette hitting the wrong exterior portion of the LHC, etc.
Particle physics is one place where extremely big or small numbers are a matter of everyday discussion I expect. Unless a perpetrator is found soon (and boy I really hope one is), I doubt this will cause consternation among the public. Maybe if there are some smart people at LHC they may be freaking out now.
But consider what if the "running the LHC kills the Earth or maybe Everything" theory is true. First of all, almost all but a small fraction of all universes stemming from our many universes existing as of say a year ago must be extinguished by now, the odds of a bird with baguette causing a short-circuit being so small. If one more freaky incident occurs (as must happen according to the theory) then I think you will start seeing a lot of people freaking out and trying to stop the thing.
Also, if "LHC kills Earth" is true, and "there is a multiverse built like an ever branching tree" is true, then building the LHC is an act of pruning the tree and the number of universes in which you may potentially exist. In other words, there are way less alternate histories now, so existence for us is a lot less richer according to one way of looking at it (the number of multiverses). Another way of looking at that might be, is that it might become easier or harder to do things like quantum computing, or evolution, or scientific advancement toward a singularity, assuming that some connection among the multiverses, such as gravity, exists.
a remake of Alfred Hitchcocks 'The Birds' is in order.
It's the work of anti-science sabageutteurs.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
They need to install a probability fuse, this idea was proposed mor than 30 years ago and ould probably have saved them a lot of money.
http://books.google.co.nz/books?id=fduW6KHhWtQC&pg=PA183&lpg=PA183&dq=probability+fuse&source=bl&ots=SuqBwj1b2r&sig=XDDSAT0O-9f0KVL4xk6N5wWrGgo#v=onepage&q=probability%20fuse&f=false
This is a link to the part of the very interesting book in which the idea of a probability fuse is first (to my knowledge) proposed. The theory is a bit iffy but if higgs bosons really do time travel then a probability fuse is an excellent and cost effective solution to the problems currently being experienced by the LHC team.
In case the short excerpt is not enough to explain the theory goes that time travel or any observation of time independent events may lead to loops in time which repeat until a stable state is achieved, much like loops in a computer program. The probability that a given time travel experiment will fail is usually higher than the probability that it will succeed. The probabilty that it will fail due to mechanical failure is usually significant. So after the countless iterations that time goes through before the paradoxes and disturbances caused by the experiment are resolved the stable state is usually hardware failure. A probability fuse is simply a part of the machine whaich has a significant but unpredictable chance of failing, and the failure of which results in the entire experiment failing. As with any fuse the trick with designing a probablility fuse is to build it such that the fuse can be easily and cheaply replaced and the result of the fuse failing doesnt damage any other equipment.
I wish they would just hire me and pay me the difference in cost between the fuse and the equipment that has failed because of their failure to use one.
Why isn't the outdoor "machinery" protected from debris ingress???
It was cool to check out the temp and pressure in the various sectors, but they are cleverly obscuring the data from Sector 7-G. I wonder why...
Two African swallows with a piece of string between them... maybe.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
Perhaps there is a religious reason. Has anyone considered the bird may have been send by God to drop the bread to halt activation of the LHC?
Blame the French.
They're the ones who came up with the baguette.
They're always causing problems... (the French, not the baguette. They're not evil, they're just baked that way.)
...uh boppa ooh mow mow, boppa ooh mow mow, uh boppa ooh mow mow, boppa ooh mow mow...
The bird was reportedly wearing colors of the french flag.
Anyone else think this is strangely similar to the Deathstar? Who builds multibillion dollar device that can be destroyed a bird and some bread? Surely they might have thought to protect critical areas that can overheat? No wonder the project hasn't been off to a good start.
This is what they were searching for, isn't it. This is it. Particle detected!
And clearly it has a bitchin' sense of humour.
.
"The spokeswoman said: “The collider extends over a very large area – you have to have a very comprehensive system to try to avoid problems of this kind. We’re talking about a couple of days down time.”"
A comprehensive system to stop birds from dropping peices of food on it? The only thing I read mentioned was a fence around the thing. But apparently a fence doesn't stop birds or people that might open up the windows on their airplane and throw food out.
The URL from The Register is: ht tp://hcc.web.cern.ch/hcc/cryo_main/cryo_main.php?region=Sector81
(I have no clue what an arc magnet is.)
So long and thanks for all the bread...
Is here
The PopSci page links to a more detailed story on the register, which has a link to this page which is a real-time temperature graph of the actual area involved.
Pretty damn cool IMHO that this data is live on the web.
The actual area where the overheating occoured is named "Sector 81".
I wonder if they have headcrabs!
The LHC... the worlds most sophisticated toaster!!!
It seems The Doctor is trying his darnedest to stop us from using this machine. Could it be that this is Dalek technology we are playing with?
Sure, a bird did it...That's what the mice wants us to think !!!!
Well, the LHC doesn't consider a small bird to be any threat, or they'd have a tighter defense. But the approach will not be easy. You are required to maneuver straight down this trench and skim the surface to this point. The target area is only two meters wide. The shaft leads directly to the reactor system. A precise hit will start a chain reaction which should destroy the accelerator. Only a precise hit will set off a chain reaction. The shaft is small, so you'll have to use baguettes.
"The approach will not be easy. You are required to maneuver straight down this trench and skim the surface to this point. The target area is only two meters wide. It's a small thermal exhaust port, right below the main port. The shaft leads directly to the reactor system. A precise hit will start a chain reaction which should destroy the station."
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It lets do time travel some goes back to kill Hitler only to have Stalin or some even worse to come to power makeing ww2 go on for a much longer time.
Engage!
-Uberhund
The real Douglas Adams twist wasn't really reported. The baguette came from the Heart of Gold. Ford Prefect caused a very small dimensional hole when he threw it out the window. Luckily, we can report that the crisps were very good so the whole incident is justified.
Unlikely events happen every day. If there are billions of possible, but highly unlikely events that might cause problems, it's not very unlikely anymore that one of them really happens in the end and makes us think: ' WTF ? This was so unlikely'
Same thing with winning in the lottery. It's hightly unlikely that a certain player wins the jackpot, doesn't change the fact though that there are always players, who win the jackpot. The player, who wins though, will say that that was highly unlikely.
I find the whole concept that we can destroy the Universe fundamentally ridiculous. Perhaps if the beam hits your ego...
I mean do you know what we are on that scale? We're specks even compared to the miniscule star we orbit. Itself a speck inside a cloud of billions of specks, amongst billions of billions of clouds of billions of specks.
And we can destroy all this? Heh, no.
There is no other fauna shown on his desert homeworld that is "about two meters" Everything was much larger or much smaller, even in the remastered edition.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
All he had was bread. But, the bird knew you needed to hook up the LHC to a sponge cake in order for the LHC to let us understand the universe.
[signature]
Hypothesis: There are multiple birds. Birds eat multiple times. Birds have to do #2 multiple times because they eat multiple times.
Alternative hypothesis: Bird po came through another universe. Obviously we can't see it, measure it, etc.
3rd hypothesis: The LHC is switched on and someone smells the smell of burning bird po. Pe-ew!
The oxen is slow but the earth is patient.
I will shave you with Occam's razor. He gave it to me.
They should have built the thing somewhere else, where there are no baguettes available. Somewhere that is so notorious for it's bland-tasting, non-nutritious bread that even hungry scavenging birds won't touch it.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
The Scientists have assured us that this thing is perfectly safe. But they didn't even anticipate debris falling into the cooling system? Somehow I'm not comforted by their brilliance.
What's up with this box everyone has to think inside of or outside of? Why does there have to be a box?
With most systems, failure is potentially dangerous but success it harmless. The LHC is the other way around: the only way there could theoretically be a danger from the LHC is if it succeeded.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
The time traveling particle and the way it is described reminds me of the story of the tower of babble. Just saying...
Perhaps it is the Universe itself, conspiring against the revelations intimated by the operation of CERN's Large Hadron Collider?
Nah; just typical French engineering. Carriers, airport terminals, EU parliament buildings.... You name it, they can screw it up. :P
Regards;
If a smallish piece of bread can bring this thing to its knees, someone should've built this to be just a little more durable. Heck - space shuttles are as simple and durable as your average backyard rock when compared to this thing. "Don't cough on it. It might break..."
Everyone wants to go on and on about some kind of metaphysical conspiracy by the universe to make sure the machine doesn't run.
But the very fact that dropping bread on an external part of the machine caused overheating is an undeniable indication of just lousy engineering. Maybe they didn't anticipate bread, but there are countless things in nature that could have landed on that machine. How about leaves or other pieces of plants? Or how about a bird dies and lands on the machine? Or just nests there?
All this spooky stuff is just a way for the engineers who fucked up to shift blame from themselves. The fact is, they just didn't think things through and built it poorly.
Now, I'm not telling you I could have done a better job. I've done more than my fair share of lousy engineering. Looking back on it, the mistakes are due to everything from silly typos to a lack of foresight. And that's actually a normal part of engineering. You can't anticipate everything, so things evolve as reality impacts your design. Lots of stupid mistakes are nevertheless understandable.
But my god, man up and admit that you didn't do it right!
The Scientists have assured us that this thing is perfectly safe. But they didn't even anticipate debris falling into the cooling system? Somehow I'm not comforted by their brilliance.
From TFS: "...but the spike produced so much heat that had the beam been on, automatic failsafes would have shut down the machine."
In other words, they did anticipate this, and built in failsafes to address it.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
this is a scale model Death Star. Even has the same weakness.
It now appears that the collider is hindered from an initial firing by a baguette, dropped by a passing bird:
...at an improbability level of 2 to the power of 5,086,362,826 to 1 against.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
What was "the bird" preference this time ? Most funny reason ever heard with high-tech device failing. Is it operated at some fish market or still many feets below surface ?
The question of "water witching" to find bombs in Iraq comes back with 50% of the respondants crying confirmation bias, but a few things go wrong on a project that most likely has tens of thousands of important components and everyone starts screaming time travel, balance of the universe, etc.
Public use of any portable music system is a virtually guaranteed indicator of sociopathic tendencies. -- Zoso
So you're telling me this multi-billion dollar piece of machinery just has parts of it exposed to the open air that birds can get into, or at least drop stuff into, and that's all it takes to make it shut down? Did they run out of plywood while cobbling this thing together? Or did the bucket of rocks holding the tarp in place over the component get knocked over by some pesky raccoon?
I have nothing compelling to say
Would you like this sandwich toasted?
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
Since this incident didn't happen while the LHC was turned on and won't delay turning it on, it cannot be attributed to the quantum suicide theory.
'Higgs-Boson' sounds like a particle discovered by two people named Higgs and Boson, which is not the case.
The Higgs particle was predicted by Higgs, amongst others, in '64. Its statistical behaviour classifies it as a boson (i.e., a particle that follows Bose-Einstein statistics), which are named after Bose.
Karma fed to this user will be promptly burnt. Be warned; be wary.
And we can destroy all this? Heh, no.
But we can try.
What the hell kind a nerds we got on this thing, anyway? Not one of them learned enough from the failings of Darth Sidious to COVER THE FUCKING EXHAUST PORT?!?!!!11?!!
How long does this have to go on before people seriously start to suspect sabotage of the LHC? The time travel theories are funny, but there are enough people vehemently opposed to the experiment ("Oh, no black holez will destroy teh worldz!", "It is morally wrong to search for God's particle") that I would think sabotage to be a fairly plausible explanation for repeated failures. But maybe that's the tin foil hat speaking.
The LHC is now cursed with the hex of pessimistic human expectations. Whether those who believe the universe will foil it, those who don't believe but will watch closely for it, or those who think they see a pattern and assume future events will fit, too many people are now looking for signs of failure. Well, whether you look for the good or for the bad in something, you will find it. Now any minor set-back will be part of some huge conspiracy against the LHC.
"One of the thousands of scientists at the LHC was stuck in traffic today, delaying an experiment, proving once and for all that God hates the LHC" etc
#1 definitely works. What do you think happened at the Medusa Cascade!
I've been praying for the re-deactivation of this machine.
Obviously, the one true God, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, the Judeo-Christian God, exists and has heard my request for the good of humanity.
He won't let a few scientists kill the whole human race! :D
Meh, mod as you will. I should be prepared to take a hit for what I just wrote.
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
Isn't leaving extremely powerful particle stream generating equipment out in the open air how supervillains get made?
...and so on. It's how we end up with the nefarious Baguette Man. Hrm... maybe it was on the French side instead of Switzerland?
Tell me this isn't how it happens: some escaping convict, with dogs barking and flashlights swinging wildly behind him is being chased through the Swiss woods. He jumps the one fence with the "do not enter" sign even as the klaxons begin to blare in warning of the experiment beginning. In his panic he doesn't notice the air-cooling door opening ahead of him and falls through into the machine itself. He yells, and bangs on the walls but is unheard and unnoticed as the cold voice of science counts down to ignition over a distant intercom. The hairs on his arms stand on end and electricity crackles through the air around him as the room begins to glow...
More the point: what kind of open-air equipment is immune to rain and vulnerable to bread?
...somewhere around December 20th, 2012.
"Yes, I have a Disaster Recovery Plan. It's called my Resume"
and they didn't add a roof?
Low-bidder awards will get you every time.
http://user.web.cern.ch/user/news/2009/091106b.html
News: 6 November 2009
LHC "bird-bread" strike
On Tuesday 3 November, a bird carrying a baguette bread caused a short
circuit in an electrical outdoor installation that serves sectors 7-8 and
8-1 of the LHC. The knock-on effects included an interruption to the
operation of the LHC cryogenics system. The bird escaped unharmed but
lost its bread.
The standard failsafe systems came into operation and after the cause
was identified, re-cooling of the machine began and the sectors were
back at operating temperature last night. The incident was similar in
effect to a standard power cut, for which the machine protection systems
are very well prepared.
information doesn't want to be free. LHC (and birds) proves it.
New sign:
Please do not be fed by the birds.
Problem solved.
At some point, aren't they just going to realize that the invisible sky wizard would like them to stop? He put 6 days into making this world, and doesn't want to see some amateurs blow the whole thing
It's an indoor piece of equipment. Above ground, but still in a building. Stupid reporter thought above ground meant outdoors.
It's a slice of bread. Birds don't SLICE bread. Nor do they carry around whole slices. Some lazy-ass contractor was sitting on a catwalk having lunch, dropped a slice, looked down into a mess of gear, shrugged, and went back to his sandwich. They're covering for his ass with stupid theories so they don't have to launch a full scale investigation and fire somebody for jamming up the works by being first clumsy and then criminally negligent by not reporting the incident and getting it taken care of.
They need to perform the full scale investigation. If the schlub drops a slice of bread somewhere else, they could lose something a lot more expensive and difficult to replace than 5 degrees kelvin.
"Listen, a 4 ounce bird could not possibly hit a small thermal exhaust port. It's impossible!"
"It's not impossible, I used to bullseye wamp rats - wait, do you mean a European or an African swallow?"
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
Just one more piece of evidence that the God particle is the Murphy particle.
Multi-reply:
On the other hand, if the LHC is really a universe suicide machine then there must be an uncountable number of universes which died, due to the baguette hitting the wrong exterior portion of the LHC, etc.
Yeah. This would also mean our civilization is the most advanced out of any and all other intelligent civilizations out there. Or maybe that we are the only ones that haven't realized the LHC will destroy our universe (small "u"). If that's the case, then presuming that experiments which are only executable by using an LHC are required for Star-Trek-style interstellar travel and communication, there's no way for another (more advanced) civilization to tell us what's going on. Wierd.
I find the whole concept that we can destroy the Universe fundamentally ridiculous.
Agreed.
Do not attribute to quantum mechanical affects that which can be explained by incompetence or malice.
Welcomed our new dough-obsessed avian overlords?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
In this case, nature just said "Fuck your particle physics, bitch! Baguette to the dome!"
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
and that's how to build an impossibilty drive
The parent is right. It should, of course, be the 23nd.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
When I clicked "read more," Slashdot displayed exactly 42 full comments.
I say this smells a lot like BS on their part, it would be easier to just lie about a passing bird flying over and dropping something, even though I have never seen a bird fly over top of something that would be such a big noise generator, and also even try traveling with something in their mouths that they so want to eat, they would avoid that like the plague.,....but who am I to talk about this, god knows the people in charge of this project would own up to some miscalculation no their part should they be given the chance.
I just wanted to say that Dickhead as a last name is... fantastic!
There can be only one Higgs-Boson.
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
Baguettes are longish, round loafes of bread. Breadsticks are short, brittle sticks of bread.
It's not that hard. Really.
In the US, a breadstick usually refers to something like this and are soft on the inside instead of brittle. If you aren't aware of the difference in scale, it would be easy to confuse, and bizarrely enough, the Wikipedia entry I linked even has a note not to confuse the two.
(I swear I didn't put that there. It seems to date back to at least early 2008. The article seems to be victim to a surprising amount of vandalism and edits by nutjobs.)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
A baguette. It figures! And this is why the LHC should never have been built in France, nor near an Au Bon Pain.
--
Toro
. . . that our best engineers have created something so potentially important, that is disabled by throwing #$%ing bread on it? really? I mean, one baguette? really?
"Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action."
If the LHC fails a third time, I'm going with the quantum suicide theory.
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
The answer is 42... move along....
Mothra?!? It can't be birds?!?!?
The next time one of those Higgs leaves without paying his tab, I'm calling the timecops.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
ffs. dont let birds or caterpillars stop you next time. geez.
Read radical news here
It was not a bird, just Gordon Freeman eating a sandwich between two portal jumps.
On the other hand, even if the LHC is completely harmless, there will still exist a universe that we can never get the LHC to work due to a seemingly never-ending sequence of bizarre and unlikely events. Just like there must exist somewhere a universe where an unlikely and bizarre sequence of events prevents me from ever starting my car.
In that sense, just because we can't get the LHC to work doesn't mean it can potentially destroy us or the universe.
The bird was obviously trained by Al Qaeda.
Interesting idea. The baguette isn't a huge deal because it won't delay the activation of the Collider but that's only one of the absurd things to happen to it, many of which have caused delays.
If the sheer number of alternate universes is contributing to our survival
and each time we avoid destruction, the number of universes is reduced
then perhaps it would benefit us to seed the multiverse with more universes.
I'm going to be letting HotBits make my decisions for a while. They supply random numbers based on radioactive decay. I'm hoping my experiment will propagate superposition to the macro world and increasing the chance that some instance of me survives whatever nasty unexpected consequences the LHC's activation may have.
Of course one could argue that my our present existence proof that nothing happens in the future that destroys this universe's past.
GENERATION 25: If you haven't yet, copy this into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. (Social experiment)
Don't you people get it??? The bird is gay! He was crossing the LHC to get to the 'other side.' That's why they call it "the other side", because they're gay! And if you eat that French Baguette, you'll be gay too!