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.'"

Comments

Re:Cosmic Time Travelling Karma?

[moorhens]

Same thing: barn swallow and red-rumped swallow nest in Europe the summer and winter in southern Africa. So it's not what the bird was but when it was that determines whether it is European or African, not that I am clever enough to claim any uncertainty involvement between birds and LHC.

Put a roof over it or something?

[Ashtead]

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?

Re:Evacuate this universe!

[Lord Bitman]

this theory has actually been proposed: That activating the LHC would actually destroy the universe, that is, the whole universe, even reaching back into the past. That would mean that the only possible universes are ones in which the LHC is never activated, which means that if we keep trying, implausible events will continue to occur, preventing the LHC from activating- after all, we're here now, right. That's _proof_ that the LHC will never be activated!