The Large Hadron Collider (left) and its arch-nemesis (right)
Posted on 11/06/2009 4:06:25 PM PST by bruinbirdman
The 27-kilometer (16.8 mile) LHC suffered serious overheating in several sections after the small piece of baguette landed in a piece of equipment on the surface above the accelerator ring.
Dr Mike Lamont, the LHC’s Machine Coordinator, said that a “a bit of baguette”, believed to have been dropped by a bird, caused the superconducting magnets to heat up from 1.9 Kelvin (-271.1C) to around 8 Kelvin (-265C), near the mark where they stop superconducting.
The Large Hadron Collider (left) and its arch-nemesis (right)
A failure like this, known as a “quench”, can be expected at around 9.6 Kelvin, CERN engineer Dr Tadeusz Kurtyka told The Register.
In theory, had the LHC been fully operational, this could cause a catastrophic breakdown like that which occurred shortly after it was first switched on last year. However, the machine has several fail-safes which would have shut it down before the temperature rose too high.
This would have forced it out of action for a few days, but nothing like the year-long breakdown last year’s quench caused.
As it is, the LHC was only undergoing test firing. Full particle-smashing duties are scheduled to restart this month.
When fully powered up, the LHC’s two beams of protons and lead ions hurtling around the huge circle at a fraction of a percent below light speed each contain the energy of a Eurostar train travelling at full speed, according to the Cern site.
It was this vast energy getting out of control that smashed the machine last time, causing huge spillage of liquid helium and throwing two 10-ton magnets off their mountings.
The succession of technical problems the LHC has suffered has led some physicists, apparently in all seriousness, to claim that it is being sabotaged by time-travelling particles from its own future.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Just another bird brain idea
Good grief....all that money spent on the Collider and no sort of thought put into such happening? *shakeshead*
I think I detect a bit of a design flaw.
Yes, Emperor, the design is flawless, except if you put a potato in the tail pipe, well, bad things happen.
More evidence of people from the future traveling back
in time to try to prevent this machine from starting up.
The time travelers obviously fed bread to the birds
hoping this would happen.
European engineering. This is what you get with 3 hour lunches.
Socialists can’t be trusted to handle anything more complicated than a cigar.
If a crust of bread can shut the thing down, if it is that sensitive to its surroundings, how far can you trust any result you get from a test?
Bird mischief. All in good fun.
Yup, the Death Star has one tiny bitty design flaw, that exhaust outlet that led straight down to the core where a single blast could destroy it.
Whoever designed that needed to be fired. =o)
Maybe it was a German bird, and this thing is in France....?
No kidding - imagine what'll happen when it rains!
Large Hadron Collider: 0
Eggheads, who needs 'em.
Really. Or if instead of bread it was bird droppings...
It might have opened a stargate to a parallel universe.
I dunno. Something here just doesn’t past the smell test.
Do these guys know what they’re doing? I wasn’t worried at all before, but this kinda cr@p is troubling, to say the least!
yitbos
Not my fault.
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