Share
Here’s a piece of news Large Hadron Collider (LHC) critics, conspiracy theorists, and doom mongers are going to love: Ready for action after suffering almost a year of delays and repairs, CERN’s massive underground particle accelerator has been struck by misfortune yet again, and by the unlikeliest of culprits.
Meanwhile, at the Bread Bomb production facility... Image: foooooey/Flickr.
More pointedly, and this is not an early April Fool, the 27km ring-shaped accelerator, which is buried outside Geneva on the border of Switzerland and France, suffered a freak bout of overheating when a passing bird inadvertently dropped a small piece of baguette into surface-based LHC machinery.
According to CERN, the bread bomb caused superconducting magnets to heat to a temperature of 8 Kelvin (-256C), which is a near-inoperable jump from the 1.9 Kelvin (-271C) the giant magnets are supposed to operate at.
Luckily for attending CERN scientists monitoring the world’s largest particle accelerator – built to smash atoms together in order to simulate the universe’s first moments of existence – the machine was being test fired when the sudden overheating occurred.
Had the giant ring been fully operational, it could have been knocked offline completely; although CERN claims various safeguards installed on the collider would have limited repairs to a matter of days as opposed to the huge yearlong failure it experienced in the latter part of 2008 after a huge helium leak.
This latest bout of bad luck will likely fuel recent comments made by (straight-faced) critics that believe the LHC is being repeatedly sabotaged by particles from its own future in order to prevent the creation of planet-destroying black holes.
Interested in a more interactive TTH? Join our Facebook Group Want regular updates from The Tech Herald? Follow us on Twitter
Advertising
Comment on this Story