Nature beats science: Large Hadron Collider scuttled by birdy baguette-bomber
Image: PopSciA bird dropping a piece of bread onto outdoor machinery has been blamed for a technical fault at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) this week which saw significant overheating in sections of the mighty particle-punisher’s subterranean 27-km supercooled magnetic doughnut.
Dr Mike Lamont, who works at the CERN control centre and describes himself as “LHC Machine Coordinator and General Dogsbody” confirmed that machinery on the surface – the LHC accelerator circuit itself is buried deep beneath the Franco-Swiss border outside Geneva – had suffered a fault caused by “a bit of baguette on the busbars”, thought perhaps to have been dropped by a bird.
This is how things are in France. You never cease to say to yourself ‘What a mess’, and then, all of a sudden, in astonishing wonder… It Works!!