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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.'"
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
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.
Because if it was, it would had been the roof collapsing that would had disabled it, and that would had caused a lot worse mess.
As a side note, I think that this confirms my pet theory concerning time travel: any attempt to do it will change the past, which changes the conditions of the travel slightly, which changes the past, and so on, until the travel never occurs and the past stops changing. In other words, a spacetime where time travel happens is unstable and decays into one where it won't. Quantum uncertainty would, in this interpretation, be there to allow causality to "stretch" enough to allow such decay; a hypothethical universe without quantum uncertainty but with sentience and time travel (which is an inevitable outcome of the Theory of Relativity, which in turn is an inevitable outcome from the laws of physics being the same for all observers) would tear itself apart. You can thus deduct the Uncertainty Principle from the Anthropic Principle (we are here, so this universe must be able to support sentient life).
I wonder if you could calculate the minimum required amount of uncertainty for spacetime to stay consistent, and how it would relate to observed/otherwise calculated values? Assume that the first singularity formed at t=0, and has been moving infinitely close to lightspeed ever since, and connects to every other time period through a wormhole, and go from there. The math is beyond me, does anyone else care to try?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
from the infinite number of parallel universes it had to happen in ours! common fate could you give our universe a break?
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...
Your complaining might, in some very specific circumstances through a weird chain of consequences, mean the destruction of the entire planet. Wouldn't it be safer if you stopped whining?
I'm having a bit of trouble understanding why you keep complaining when this possibility clearly exists.
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.
Please remind me. Who's paying for this piece of junk again?
And you thought the death star had stupid vulnerabilities...
"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.
"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.
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
"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.
Or, perhaps it will bring infinite good / rapture / utopia / drm free music and something evil is trying to stop it.
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."
So the space is basically a peak, but with a hole in the graph instead of an area of zero slope.
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...
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.)
Because whatever this machine is capable of doing, even more is happening in the upper atmosphere all the time.
...uh boppa ooh mow mow, boppa ooh mow mow, uh boppa ooh mow mow, boppa ooh mow mow...
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 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?
Why? Even if you were to go in the past and change the future, that doesn't mean the future would be changed enough to prevent the travel back to the past.
Different roads can still lead to the same destination ... or have you never heard of the expression "All roads lead to Rome."
And all that's assuming that the universe won't tolerate what, to us, is a paradox - not a sure thing, or that causality is preserved, which is also debatable.
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.
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?
As a side note, I think that this confirms my pet theory concerning time travel: any attempt to do it will change the past, which changes the conditions of the travel slightly, which changes the past, and so on, until the travel never occurs and the past stops changing.
Or traveling back in time is what caused events to occur the way they did, so the time travel doesn't change the past. See Babylon 5, particularly the nice summary line, "It all happened just the way I remember."
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?
Because a black hole with the mass of a carbon atom exerts exactly the same gravitational force on other particles as a normal carbon atom. You don't see normal carbon atoms causing the collapse of the galaxy, do you?
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...
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.
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
...my pet theory concerning time travel: any attempt to do it will change the past, which changes the conditions of the travel slightly, which changes the past, and so on, until the travel never occurs and the past stops changing. In other words, a spacetime where time travel happens is unstable and decays into one where it won't.
Prior art. See Larry Niven, "Theory and Practice of Time Travel", 1971 (I think)
If the conditions are reset to one in which there is no time travel, then it seems to me that the initial conditions would go back to the ones that allowed time travel in the first place. It seems to me that a more likely event is that it would decay into one where time travel is self reinforcing, but extremely limited, and probably of minimal usefulness. Think 12 Monkeys.
Other than that, it is more likely that the universe itself prevents time travel, rather than time travel being self-negating. I think that is the most likely explanation. One way to test it might be to have a sort of "Schodinger Switch" that would go off and disable the LHC once some incredibly rare even happens, like a large group of atoms ceases to exist. In order to force that to happen, you could simply pledge to continue trying to operate the LHC forever, until it becomes easier for the universe to trigger that one event (which would shut the program down permanently), that it would be for it to continue causing all of these individually rare, but adaptively nigh-impossible events. Of course, but then something nasty but far more likely, involving the wider world might happen to stop it, like a meteor impact, nuclear war, plague, or some such. Yeah, so maybe we ought to give it a few more tries, then stop it, so as not to tempt fate...
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.
Actually, I find it a pretty funny username and I'm a major Philip K Dick fan.
'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.
I read your post five times and I still have no fucking idea what you just said.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
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?
> 'The bird dropped some bread on a section of outdoor machinery...'
Foreman: Uh, Joe, you work in that area. Do you know how this bagel piece got in there? It's gonna cost us a lotta money.
Joe: No, not me man. It must have been a bird and not me throwing away a piece I didn't wanna eat, uhh, not that I ate a bagel anywhere near that area, or outside here at all, I mean, or even inside.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
...somewhere around December 20th, 2012.
"Yes, I have a Disaster Recovery Plan. It's called my Resume"
Can you explain to me why it's a good idea to get in a hunk of metal traveling 60+ mph on the same roads that we let 80 year old people drive on? Or do you not leave your house?
I haven't done the math, but I can say with a fair amount of certainty that the odds of the LHC destroying the universe are about the same as you getting struck by lightning, a comet, a crashing 747, and a baguette, all at once.
The part you quoted already answered that, but I'll reiterate:
If you travel into the past, and end up causing any changes, then those changes cause the conditions at the point where you start your travel to be slightly different (because laws of physics treat past and future symmetrically, so each current state has not only just one possible future, but also just one possible past, so any change in the past is guaranteed to change the current state slightly). Since the conditions are different, your actions in the past will also be different. This then causes further changes to the conditions of your travel, and so forth.
Since the period of time that forms the loop keeps on changing, it's guaranteed to eventually hit a sequence where your time travel doesn't happen. Once it does, it'll stop changing, since the loop has been eliminated.
Another way of looking at this is to remember that, according to the Theory of Relativity, time is a property of the universe rather than something that exists independently of it. Consequently, the view of universe as a system evolving according to a set of rules is misleading. A more accurate model would be a jigsaw puzzle, with locations in space and time as the pieces and laws of physics as the rules that dictate how they can be connected together. In this view, time travel is unlikely to happen because the more neighbours a piece has, the more difficult (maybe impossible after a certain limit) it is for it to satisfy the consistency - or causality - requirements of them all.
However, that model requires one to give up the simple notion of causality as past events influencing future ones, since which piece can be fit where in a jigsaw puzzle depends on all neighbouring pieces, including the future ones. This is actually more consistent with the laws of physics, which don't discriminate based on teh direction of time, and also used all the time by humans to try to piece together past events from evidence, but it's also somewhat counter-intuitive and easy to mistake for time travel.
Different orbital paths might cross at the same point, put the objects following them have different velocities, so they'll continue on different paths.
True. However, please understand that universe tolerating a paradox would also logically invalidate the whole of science, including anything the LHC might find. In fact, it would likely invalidate logic itself.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
If the time travel you're thinking were to happen, then it would be between possible universes. And the universe you'd end up in would have all along, had somebody (namely you) pop in from a different universe.
If the kind of time travel where to exist such that you couldn't change anything (think 12 Monkeys) then the universe would turn from non-deterministic to deterministic.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
That's where the quantum improbabilities come in, allowing events to evolve differently from the same starting point.
No, because as long as the time loop exists it will cause the past to keep changing, however slightly. It's just a matter of time (metatime? we need new terminology for discussions of time travel) before it changes in such a way as to break the loop.
Self-reinforcing systems are still unstable in the presence of a more stable state, if there's no upper bound to maximum deviation before the system is forced to return to its local stability point. And since we're talking about things that happen outside of time, to time in fact, there's all eternity for the system to decay.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
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.
Posting things like this on the front page makes /. look very childish.
OH NOES! How will we EVER recover Slashdot's good name?!
Timothy, you should know better.
You MUST be... very fun at parties. :P
The enemies of Democracy are
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
Its not the galaxy you have to worry about, its Earth. And normal carbon atoms don't consume others that get close enough, they repel them at a certain point. Of course, if you put one of these black holes on the end of a popsicle stick, it'd take years to devour the stick, which would give us plenty of time to design some sort of containment unit to keep other mass from adding to the problem.
Of course there is no actual proof that being 'sucked into a black hole' will destroy anything, its all pure theory.
Assuming that crossing the event horizon causes a conversion from mass to energy for some reason, thats still not something to be concerned about since the theoretical time dilation effects as you move closer to the event horizon are going to make it so you never really cross the event horizon.
The next assumption is that you'll be torn apart by the gravitational pull, but this is also likely as incorrect as the theories about the pressure being too great on the ocean floor for life to survive. I'm more inclined to believe the gravitational stresses would cause death, but I also believed that life couldn't survive at the very deepest parts of the ocean.
One thing science has taught me, and taught me well is more often than not, our theories are wrong. Just because there are 'great minds' working on this doesn't change that, these minds are working on 'great things'.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
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.
When the teeny-tiny black hole collides with another carbon atom
First of all, the odds of that happening are almost immeasurably small. Gravity is practically negligible at the atomic scale, never mind the huge number of other particles pulling in every other direction anyway. If this black hole is moving, it will just pass through the empty space that most atoms are made of. My semi-educated guess of the cross-section of a single-atom black hole would be somewhere on the order of neutrinos.
it will absorb it right?
Someone with more knowledge of astrophysics will have to answer the question of what happens if a black hole absorbs particles that are nearly as massive as itself.
"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.
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.
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?
Nope - it's not a repeating loop. It's one time through the loop.
Otherwise it would take an infinite amount of energy.
Goes through the loop once, conditions are changed, conditions for looping no longer apply, time (and the particles) continues to flow forward.
"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]
No, you are thinking of a particle exiting the loop and entering it again besides its own earlier incarnation(s) again and again. I'm talking about the loop itself, passing information to its own causal past, causing more or less random changes there until you finally by chance end up with a history without the loop, at which point it stops changing.
The loop is affecting its own causal past. That means that information does does go through the loop again and again. If it doesn't, if information exiting the loop can't enter the loop again, then by definition no time travel has taken place.
The whole point it's impossible to put together a consistent spacetime which includes loops. The pieces of the jigsaw puzzle simply don't fit together that way. And inconsistencies represent breaches in the rules on how one point in spacetime fits to neighbouring points - the laws of physics, in other words. So, my argument is that if there's any nonempty set of rules for causal connectivity between points in spacetime - any truly unbreakable laws of physics, in other words - then time travel is impossible.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
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
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.
Why can't a loop affect its' own causal past? We already know that causality is broken in some instances in this universe, so we don't have to worry about every little inconsistency.
And no, time travel is NOT impossible - you do it all the time. Come back in 24 hours, and you'll see you're a day in the future.
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)
Can you explain to me why it's a good idea to get in a hunk of metal traveling 60+ mph on the same roads that we let 80 year old people drive on? Or do you not leave your house?
I haven't done the math, but I can say with a fair amount of certainty that the odds of the LHC destroying the universe are about the same as you getting struck by lightning, a comet, a crashing 747, and a baguette, all at once.
Oh, that's easy! The falling comet, while causing a lightning storm because of all the atmospheric friction, collides with a 747 in which a passenger carries a baguette. All of it, of course, falls on you because that's what Murphy's laws say.