Baguette Dropped From Bird's Beak Shuts Down The Large Hadron Collider (Really)

Well in their defense, who would have designed billion dollar machinery to be failsafe against a bird dropping "something" on the outdoor portion of it. It's just so unlikely an occurrence that no one could ever plan for something like that.

That sound you just heard was a far away scientist slapping his head and saying "Doh"

Are we sure this is not actully a "murphy" particle collector?

We've given a bird a piece of bread designed to drop at the exact spot where over heating for the particle acceleratot. Lets see if the scientist notice.

Isint this thing underground? how did a bird get in there

When some top scientists started talking about time travel and causality I thought they were mad. Basically they were saying safe guards in nature would send ripples backwards in time to scuttle the expiriment that created the offending particle.

I'll agree these ideas are completly out there but then something like this happens and you go Hmmmm. A warning! Or just a freak occurance.

Just wondering...why would one little piece of bread cause severe overheating? Then again, it's such a complicated machine...

Must have been a bagel with everything.

@SuperChefJ its ironic that your picture is pizza
i reread it and the bread landed on a machine above ground so im good

yeah yeah... blame it on the bird.
(and the space shuttle is the most complex machine ever built)

It's nature's way of saying "Don't do it you idiots!"

I propose we start calling all defects in Colliders Baguettes

replace "Bird" with "Scientist"???
Birds don't drop food, people do

Never trust an Oystercatcher near a particle accelerator. That's experimental physics 101.

I think mitEj's right lol

Particle physics is for the birds.........or at least the birds would have it be that way.

Wow, that sure looks like fun dude!

RT
www.private-web.se.tc

i Think the most complex "machine" ever built is our brain, not the collider.

I KNEW it... the LHC is a TOASTER! And not a very good one at that...

Was it a European swallow, or an African swallow?

Mycellium - don't you mean "Dough" !

Particle physics gives me a hadron. This story is tragic. I was anticipating the results of the experiment for so long, and now I must wait even longer.

...but look at all the money they're saving by switching to GEICO...

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.

What I want to know is....

Did said bird drop Ciabatta or a Hovis particle?

Much can be worked out from such an answer.

I think this million dollar thing will not work the scientist finding some silly reasons to cover it (marie sathanam :))

isn't this the plot to the "the return of the jedi" for the destruction of the death star?

Sounds like a simple case of negligence. Someone was clearly screwing around, throwing bread where they shouldn't have been throwing it, and now we're blaming birds for the problem. Birds aren't the problem, sir. Birds aren't ever the problem. They aren't at fault for getting sucked into wind turbines and they aren't at fault for flying into the side of a glass building. They're the real victims. My heart weeps for the blameless birds. Why won't this society ever stop being so mean?

That's gotta be the most expensive way to toast a slice of bread imaginable.

"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored." Aldous Huxley

I don't understand how a "section of outdoor machinery" can be so sensitive to something being on it. Isn't this going to happen all the time?? Rain will fall on it, leaves will blow on it, birds will crap on it, etc. Shouldn't it be covered if it is so delicate?

Well, look on the bright side: if the freak accidents keep coming, at least we don't have to worry about any planet-eating black holes for a while.

Frankly, though, I have to agree with Chrisbap: if this machinery is so sensitive that having a piece of bread on it will cause catastrophic overheating (to say nothing of windblown litter, rain, snow, etc., etc.), then what is it doing uncovered outdoors???

It doesn't sound that implausible to me. If the device happened to regulate heat, such as a radiator or air inlet, then it may not take much change in air flow to cause a failure. Especially if other components are relying on it.

An example could be a radiator. Bread gets caught between the cooling fins in an area where heat exchange is high, lowering the effectiveness of the cooling. Over time devices that rely on this radiator may start to encounter heat related problems, which could affect other systems on other areas that are not directly connected to the radiator.

If the device is an air inlet, then impeding the air flow may be all that is necessary. Even if normal precautions are taken against leaves and other normal material found outdoors, a piece of bread may overcome them. First, the bread may be soft enough to mold itself to the grill if enough suction is being applied. Then the air will dry the bread effectively making it into a form fitted block. Less air flow means less cooling effectiveness down the line. Again, a cascade affect could become possible depending on how much other devices rel on that source for cooling - either as a primary source, or secondary or tertiary.

Since a critical component in a machine does NOT have to be large, it may not require a lot of cooling. In these cases, a piece of bread would indeed be enough to cause a failure such that the entire operation has to be shut down to ensure nothing is damaged, or that a more serious problem is not culpable.

i think they forgot an egg in there. . . . so expected to get more birds being reported in there

kinechron:

While your analogy to a radiator is persuasive from an engineering perspective, it does not hold water from a design perspective.

The more critical the component the more redundant it must be, period. Even in aircraft, where space and weight are of critical concern, some effort in this regard is made.
But and where space, weight, and apparently money, are no object, double, trible, dodecaduple redundancy should be of paramount concern, especially for mission-critical components exposed to the elements.

Atomic reactor design is a good example here, and I defy you to find a commercial power generation facility with a non-redundant heat regulator, much less one exposed to the elements in a way that a piece of toast can cause mission failure.

And let's not even get started about what this says about the maintenance regime that allowed such a critical component not to be monitored in a way that averted thermal abort.

This whole thing smacks of nothing more or less than old-fashioned incompetence, in design, implementation, and operation. Nothing new, just rendered relevant because of the sums involved.

The LHC has been a huge success. Really!

Think of all the billions spent on its construction. This provided tremendous revenues to various contractors and suppliers, who employed numerous workers and purchased large amounts of material and equipment from still other suppliers. It also provided jobs to many scientists, who might otherwise have had nothing to do but write useless papers without compensation.

Even if it never works, a large number of workers and scientists will remain employed trying to make it work.

This is bound to stimulate the sluggish economy to everyone's benefit.

Frankly, we need more such useless science projects if we're ever to regain our prosperity!

This article and all of the comments above have really made my day. Thank for all the laughs this afternoon :)

The Force is strong in that little bird. Who would've thought he was capable of flying through the turbo laser turrets and skim the surface of the complex without the aid of his onboard computer?

Bird:

Yeah, I used to drop entire loaves of bread on swamp rats in my T-16 back home.

Sadly, you humans are not receiving the hints we're dropping, and the fate of your civilization is about to evaporate.

The bird was later discovered to have links to Al Qaeda...

What came first? The success of the particle accelerator or the bird with the yummy, buttery bread. mmmmmm. particly-accelerated breakfast.

"I have come to Earth to rule the assembled multitudes"
Bird [1:1]

Even the birds know, this thing needs to wait for 2012 to end the world.

Heck. Thank heaven it wasn't Danish Rugbrød..

the specific weight would have been out of bounds...

in zero maybe, but not on land...

Doesn't anyone remember the Texas Superconducting Supercollider from the late '80s and early '90s?

Here's Wikipedia on it:

The Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), planned to be built mostly in Waxahachie, Texas, would have been the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator complex. Its planned ring circumference was 87.1 kilometres (54.1 mi) with an energy of 20 TeV per beam of protons, potentially enough energy to create a Higgs boson, a particle predicted by the Standard Model but not yet detected. The project's director was Roy Schwitters, a physicist at the University of Texas at Austin and Harvard University. The project was canceled in 1993.

Cost overruns and competing dollars from the space program led to the cancellation.

Or did they? Hmmm.

Before you get to critical of the LHC, do you know of any other civilization that is capable of assembling such a complex machine. It could take decades to work out the bugs. We'll just have to be patient. Then when the LHC is fully operational and producing scientific results, it will be many more years of analysis to produce any conclusions.

Did we say this was the modern space age?

My opinion: All they have invented is the world's 1st but bulkiest photon torpedo launcher. It makes a baby exploding black hole, that pierces the skin of the torus and jumps outside the magnetic bottle, traveling near the speed of light. It explodes a milli second later at some random point - BANG! You've got an exploding photon torpedo.

I hope nobody gets hurt. The higher the voltage, the bigger the bang. The faster to the speed of light, the further it goes to its target. Let the games begin. What the DOD is going to ask, can they steer the dang thing, and make it light enough to mount on a space station. It's a fully re-loadable weapon that is more effective than a tactical nuke, because an electrically neutral exploding black hole can explode INSIDE its target. (Pillboxes beware, as well as bunkers a mile below ground! Nobody is safe!) Hummm.

Just like when the atom bomb was invented - it's not going to yield much science until they get a grip on what it is. It either makes a big bang, or it melts a coil every-time, until they discover its true purpose, and can transcend the technology they have created, to build a defensive weapon against it, which took decades with nuclear weapons. Once the secret to its power gets out, the race is on with China and Russia to get one of their own. We could even see a race to the moon to catch the higher ground, so they can threaten with this thing. A 2 second lifespan (Earth Range) is not unreasonable, if the accelerator achieves 99.9999% percent of the speed of light or whatever. Just a thought.

I am glad that the Collider is experiencing these delays. I think that the theory that mini black holes generated by the device will evaporate quickly into Hawking radiation is an obvious fallacy -- relativistic time dilation makes all black-holes-in-formation last forever relative to their frame of reference, us -- and that the device is in fact a doomsday machine. A non-evaporating mini-black-hole-in-formation structure will quickly slam into the collider machinery, instantly absorb machinery molecules into its tiny accretion disk, lose its momentum, and bore its way down into the center of the Earth, leaving a kind of "thermonuclear volcano" behind itself.

Imagine if all the brilliant folks here were to have been consulted beforehand? Why is it SO obvious to us that birds WILL drop things. Imagine if it HAD been African OR European swallows with coconuts? How much MORE damage would have been created!

I think that all that will happen is we will be left with more questions

Maybe all of these faulty kinks will be worked out by 2012...

Well... if you want to look at it in a conspiracy theory ala 2012, there's enough to make someone a little leery. Supposedly a Higgs Boson particle will be created by the LHC. Every hour or so, it will create another one. If the machine starts like it is supposed to in mid-November of 2009, it will take THREE years for enough of the particles to be created to really get enough to prove that the Higgs Boson particle really exists.

So if they start in November of this year (2009), what will the year be when they have a lot of these particles? Yup, 2012. And supposedly if you believe the hype, these same particles are going "back in time" to keep from being discovered. If the hype & conspiracy theories are correct, we're screwed.

Sounds to me like someone wasteda LOT of time, effort and money on this stupid project.

RT
www.private-web.se.tc

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If anyone ever needed proof of how stupid scientists are this is it. Anyone with common sense would have covered delicate and sensitive areas of the equipment.

This project should have never been built. The world needs more simple things like trees - mankind having destroyed 50% of the world's forest. Spend the money where it is needed first.

This only feeds scientists ego.

Two kids smashing things together "to see what will happen". This is a potentially dangerous waste of an enormous amount of money.

As previous poster said
"this is nature's way of saying don't do this idiots".

-----------
Nature is in the intensive care ward, and we are ripping out the IVs.

"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."

automatic failsafes would have shut down the machine - would have?? perhaps might have would be a better word. Were these "automatic failsafes" designed by the same moron who didn't cover the external workings?

-------
Nature is in the intensive care ward, and we are ripping out the IVs.

LOL, there are so many funny comments on this one article (I've noticed other articles with less than half the attention this one received), and I keep on wondering how many scientists are cursing their bad luck right now, or even perhaps blaming the janitor for doing a poor job of cleaning the place. Hmmm, maybe it WAS the janitor.

I guess this means no "god" partical for a while longer.

Hey HuangzVixen - I wouldn't touch your website with Petrus' keyboard, but thanks for the cleavage intermission. These comments are getting pretty stuffy.

It absolutely had to have been a jalapeño baguette.

The female mind is the most complicated thing ever made. That's why they can never be a president or leader of any kind. Ever.

@whatscience- It's "A New Hope"

@draebor- I immediately had that idea after reading the article, but then I read the comments and you had had the idea. It was extremely funny.

@sciencecynic- Funny sarcasm.

@petrus- If the black hole really did form and not disintegrate, it would hit the reactor and suck all matter from this planet into itself in an hour because of its extreme density and gravity.

Obviously, this bird has been talking to the woodpeckers that attacked the Space Shuttle external tank, or the other woodpeckers that stopped a Lockheed Martin laser test -- perhaps relatives of the vultures that got roasted by STS-114. Clearly, Hitchcock was right, and the birds are retaliating against all high technology!

Forget about particle acceleration, straighten that stupid thing out and make an awesome potato gun out of it.
Can you imagine???

wholly mackerell

the birds just rrreeeeeeeeaaaaaaaalllllllllllyyyyyy hate that thing.
p.s. its like the bread is dropped in as a mini black hole is created and hits a parallel universe Albbert Einstein in the head and kils him? :) so dark.

Just last month, when I was getting jumped on by about a cozen defenders of this cash cow project, I worked real hard to point out specifics regarding the prudent person and expectation of return for continued investment. Or how utterly uncaring it is for the science community to be party to waste on such a colossal scale when they could be engaging in real scientific development of high efficiency energy storage, or a higher efficiency solar cell...anything but this eternal quest for a new type of weaponized beam or bomb. Anyone who questions any of their purposes or methods is quietly cashiered. Dissension in the ranks isn't tolerated well by the multibillion dollar business concerns that are being controlled by the same people who control defense research. More bread crumbs to follow...

dozen, before the spelling police arrive.

You guys may all think it quite implausible that a piece of bread could shut this thing down, but there have been some serious inconsiderations from the designers.
In Aug2009 they found a family of rats inside the tube of the accellerator where it is supposed to be a vacuum void of particles... yet a whole nest of rats?! Come on!
I think this thing is one huge money trap.
Billions spent on a "promise" as so often is the case with scientific research. And they will "produce" false results to support their theory that got them all this govenment money in the first place just so they can screw around for another year. It would be like an animal exterminator breeding rats and releasing them in the community so he can get more work.
Personally, I LOVE SCIENCE, I LOVE the idea of what we MAY be able to discover, but there comes a point where you must ask yourselves, "is this really financially necessary at all? If you prove even 1/2 your theory, would it have been worth the billions and billions spent and to yet be spent? What results/benefits will we realize within the next, say, 50 years, from our billions spent, should you even find what you're looking for?"

Talk about a design flaw! You'd think that the brilliant people in charge of accelerating imperceptible subatomic particles would at least consider bird-proofing the place.

but how can a small piece of bread stop the thingy from working? Its not magnetic.

if the collider itself is below then why would they put something so impoortant above--wait asec--theNazis!!!

lol

most of people commenting here seem to think this an US project here in the US. its actually on the franco/swiss border.

I think nature is trying to tell us something. ??????? But What? - Behold, the power of a Baguette

Was it a pelican?

what a wast of bread i wonder if that bird could carry a coconut to England.

Num Num Num Num...

@Shazam lol

There probably won't be a black hole. So what happened. A bird, part of our three dimentional light based universe dropt a light based Buagette randomly.
So the bible says Jesus is the God of randomness. {The coin in the fishes mouth story from the bible, etc.)
Jesus is light. (bible)
Previously, the colliders controller circuits were fried (obvious over power)despite expert engineering.
So extra current from somewhere. Where? Looking for bosons using superconductors.
So, obviously the superconductors pulled in a mass of Bosons or electron pairs and simply squared the output voltage verses calculated voltage and fried the circuits.
You were looking for Bosons, you got em. This was the original work stoppage the first try a tear or so ago.
So now the bird dropping the buagette makes sense.
So now there wont be a black hole, (Sorry, Prof Hawking)
Now there make be a link between dark matter and our own light based universe or a tear in space time. Uh OH.
With the dark matter universe always expanding there may be a bulge or buble into our universe that would do bad things like creating an earthquake at least that is never been heard of before. destabilizing the earth and making mountains into valleys and valleys into mountains.

If we are able to re-constitute our science office,there will not be a collider or many other programs based from Hawkings Idiots,who were borne out of the Proffesorship of the "Inimitable Mr. Einstein" who baffled everyone with bullshit ,as that was all he was taught,or dreamed up.
The light frequency,cymatic "Glued" universe just does not work "Their" way.
Black holes are galaxy connectors,"Guaranteed' and they do not need to try and produce one with everyones money.
The big bang idiots are some of the biggest simpletons on the planet,sure,there were system problems in certain sectors of the universe that remain in "The System" and cause re-curring troubles,but that has nothing to do with the development of the "Super Universes"
I I have said many times in many places until the NSA Jerks who are not from this planet,by the way"Guaranteed" we live in system 28 here and there are normally 54 galaxies per superuniverse,and this system was not finished and only 36 exist here due to the system explosion in our system that made all of the petroleum and componentry re-curs on its perfectly timed periodicities.
Grid scientists from my department have alot to teach,but we have to take one hell of a set of beatings to do so.
Shame on you "Citizens" doing harm to their own country,you know who you are.