No, No Baguette!

November 06, 2009

Oh noes! We're doomed! And it's not because of the 2012 prophecies, but because of the Large Hadron Collider, that giant particle accelerator in Switzerland that fear-mongers are convinced will destroy the earth with black holes -- assuming it ever turns back on and gets up to its peak energies.

The LHC was all set to be fired up and ready to go -- and then an errant bird with a taste for good bread went and dropped a hefty crumb on a sensitive piece of outdoor equipment. The end result? Overheating the accelerator and causing yet another delay for the beleaguered collider. For a big bad, world-destroying machine, the LHC is turning out to be more of a hot-house orchid, brought down by a l'oiseau and une baguette. (The bird is just fine, by the way -- probably just peeved at the waste of good quality bread.)

Notes Popular Science: "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." Or, as New York Times reporter Dennis Overbye summed up that particular theory: "A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather."

Don't you love the sly innuendo of "otherwise distinguished physicists?" Let us heed our ornithological omen, people. Maybe Holger Bech Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya -- the harbingers of this particular fringe-y theory -- are onto something: a vast conspiracy on the part of Nature to keep lowly mortals from discovering her innermost secrets. Nature doesn't really abhor a vacuum, but apparently it abhors the Higgs.

Admit it: the conspiracy theory is way more interesting that the far more mundane (and likely) explanation: that with such a large, expensive and complicated machine, there are bound to be vulnerabilities and technical difficulties before everything gets up and running smoothly.

Photo: Popular Science

Comments

[rolak]

That was no baguette - the bird dropped the 'm' it stole here from the link ;-)
s/www.popsci.co/www.popsci.com/ should do it.

[Kitty]

Maybe Schroedinger's cat can eat that bird.