Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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.
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
"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.
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.
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?
all of them
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.
It's the work of anti-science sabageutteurs.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Two African swallows with a piece of string between them... maybe.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
Is here
The LHC... the worlds most sophisticated toaster!!!
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.
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?
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.
You didn't watch the real version: Super Star Wars for the SNES. The first level with luke is you whompin' whomprats. :)
--Jimmy
'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.
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 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.
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.
"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
The parent is right. It should, of course, be the 23nd.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)