Yeah, so the LHC really, really can’t catch a break. Not only are bizarre electrical failures, Al Qaeda operatives and time travelers out to get them – PopSci reveals that even birds bearing French pastry are getting their licks in:
The bird dropped some bread on a section of outdoor machinery, eventually leading to significant over heating 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.
Read more here.
I suppose the moral of the story is the larger the sensitive piece of equipment is, the more sensitive the large piece of equipment is.
The time-traveling bird twist is interesting….
Two esteemed physicists have formulated a theory that suggests an alternative explanation: perhaps a time-traveling bird was sent from the future to sabotage the experiment. Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, have published several papers over the past year arguing that the CERN experiment may be the latest in a series of physics research projects whose purposes are so unacceptable to the universe that they are doomed to fail, subverted by the future.
Cheers,
Matt