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

PopSci ^ | 11/05/09 | Stuart Fox

[LibWhacker]

The Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, just cannot catch a break. First, a coolant leak destroyed some of the magnets that guide the energy beam. Then LHC officials postponed the restart of the machine to add additional safety features. Now, a bird dropping a piece of bread on a section of the accelerator has, according to the Register, shut down the whole operation.

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.

This incident won't delay the reactivation of the facility later this month, but exposes yet another vulnerability of the what might be the most complex machine ever built. With freak accident after freak accident piling up over at CERN, the idea of time traveling particles returning from the future to prevent their own discovery is beginning to seem less and less far fetched.

[PERKY2004]

So it's the world's most powerful particle accelerator and (presumably) cost billions .... and it can't stand up to .... birdies???

[Slings and Arrows]

[SunkenCiv]

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[PERKY2004]

ROFL!!!

[RightOnTheLeftCoast]

Well, a baguette is shaped like a large...

Oh. “Hadron.”

Nevermind.

[Slings and Arrows]

LOL!

LOLbirds. Who knew?

[skr]

...these black holes, if created, probably wouldn’t actually suck up our entire planet. I guess that is reassuring.

It's good to know that our current black hole, aka Washington D.C., won't be lonely once it has some microscopic company.

[samtheman]

Messages and warnings from the Universe...

yes

[Paradox]

Something like that.

[kickonly88]

No doubt. What a great thread,me and the wife had some good laughs at the expense of this “machine”!

[chimera]

These things are incredibly finicky. I've used a lot of apparatus in my career, accelerators, reactors, NMR, laser ablation, mass spec, et al. Of them all, accelerators gave me the most headaches for things going wrong at the worst times.

[allmost]

I've used the term “junk” with regards to this thing many times in the past. The competing international contractors being my main reason. The reality of even the best design being subjected to this much nepotism and shear waste actually functioning seems far-fetched to me. I've got a few emails to send out. :)

[a fool in paradise]

Hadron, we haz a problem!

[AFPhys]

You are right. Accelerators are probably the most challenging machines ever built by man, incluing reactors and moon-rockets and war machines.

I could give people here some some comparisons to give ideas of what type of vacuum, electronic, remote controls, magnet, heat loading, mechanical specifications, plumbing, monitoring, electrical stability, safety interlocks, number of components and miles of wire, massive computer programming, materials, radiation damages, etc.

However, I’ll limit to two examples:

The heat loading on components we had to deal with at the accelerator I worked at ranged up to 100watts/sq.mm. (Have you ever burned yourself on the 30,000mm3 surface of a 100watt light bulb?-— imagine having to deal with heat loading 30,000 times that heat.). Fortunately, most areas the heat loading was much more managable.

Second: the vacuums needed require that each and every joint and weld in these machine pass “leak tests” so stringent that it would take over 1000 years for a liter of air to make its way through the joint. A single fingerprint on the inner wall will corrupt the vacuum such that the machine would be useless for six months while it evaporates. The vacuum pumps used to maintain the vacuum can’t even be turned on until the pressure is one-ten-millionth of an Earth’s atmosphere.

[SunkenCiv]

My guess is, the machine is a turkey. My previous take on it remains, which is, there’s no way to reproduce the results of any experiment run on the thing, because there is no other machine that can do what this thing can (well, can’t) do. :’)

[ArrogantBustard]

A single fingerprint

That's why God gave us nitrile gloves.

[Bob]

Joseph “a gentleman doesn’t go motoring about after dark” Lucas

I saw someone wearing a tee-shirt with that quote at a British car show recently. The shirt described Lucas as The Prince of Darkness.

[chimera]

The vacuum systems on the ones I worked on drove me nuts. I can remember disassembling and cleaning diffusion pumps at very early hours in the morning. Minor outgassing (no such thing really as “minor” outgassing, it was all a major hassle) would ruin an entire beamline and a dozen or so experiments running off of it. Just mounting an experiment took years of planning and months of work. We'd get quadrillions of events and maybe a few of significance. Back in the day there'd be miles of magtape just to record the events coming in on the data streams.

[kickonly88]

Not only that,Do you know why the English drink warm beer? Because Lucas makes refrigerators,too.

[brytlea]

I gotta say, it does give one pause!