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LHC broken by bread and birds

by on06 November 2009

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That is technology for you


Humanity's
most complicated machine, which is designed to find the God particle, has been broken thanks to the action of birds armed with a stick of French bread.

CERN is reporting that the Large Hadron Collider has been shutdown yet again after a piece of bread fell into the outdoor machinery. The bit that the bread found its way into operates at 1.9 Kelvin, but, thanks to the bread bomb it overheated.

This nearly causing the LHC's niobium-titanium magnets to cease superconducting and could have crippled the LHC yet again. CERN claims that it won't delay the full reactivation of the device, scheduled for later this month. It believes that a passing bird dropped the bread into the machinery.

Some people believe that the LHC is being sabotaged by boffins from the future who think it might cause all sorts of kirfuffles to the laws of physics. Still it is a little rare when future scientists train birds to drop French rolls into the machine. Next it will be a pride of quantum cats who may or may not be alive. (One of them may or may not have scared the bird, making it drop the bread. sub.ed.)
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