Post a random picture

Post Reply New Topic

I love this photograph by Diane Arbus

Relative sizes of the planets in the solar system and several well known stars. (from Wikipedia)

November 7, 2009

(ChattahBox) — In another cosmic turn of the surreal, the Large Hadron Collider -LHC the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator (16.8 mile), suffered serious overheating in several sections after the small piece of baguette dropped by a passing bird, landed in a piece of equipment on the surface above the accelerator ring. The controversial device, housed in the gigantic CERN laboratory in the Jura mountains just outside of Geneva, on the border of France and Switzerland, would allow scientists to re-create conditions that existed a trillionth of a second after the big bang, as well as prove the existence of the spooky “Higgs boson” entity, also called the “God Particle” which give “things” their mass.

In theory, had the LHC been fully operational, this latest incident could have caused a catastrophic breakdown like that which occurred shortly after it was first switched on last year. On Sept. 19, 2008, just days after the Hadron’s launch, a small piece of electrical cable providing power to the magnets broke loose, sending a shower of sparks across the wiring, causing a year-long breakdown

The failure of LHC to get to full particle-smashing so far is a relief to some scientists, who fear the experiment could cause several tiny black holes to form, which would grow and devour the entire Earth. The succession of technical problems the LHC has suffered has led yet other physicists, like Dr. Holger Bech Neilson of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen speculating that the manufacture of Higgs bosons may be so “abhorrent” to nature,” as Dennis Overbye wrote in the New York Times, that their creation would cause ripples backward through time to stop the collider before it could produce one, much like the paradox of a time traveler going back in time to halt his own birth by killing his grandfather.

lol