Originally Posted by TRANCOSO (Post 185340)

CERN’s LHC Shut Down Again

And again CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is out of order! This time it had to be turned off, because a bird dropped a breadcrumb (I’m NOT making this up!) in the huge collider, causing the LHC to overheat.

CERN said that the LHC will be repaired quickly and should be back in full use, later this month. It was only last week that CERN started up the collider again, after it was shut down in September 2008.

Originally Posted by Steve_A (Post 185347)

That was lucky. They could have all ended up as toast! (at least the piece of baguette!).

Originally Posted by TRANCOSO (Post 185340)

CERN’s LHC Shut Down Again

And again CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is out of order! This time it had to be turned off, because a bird dropped a breadcrumb (I’m NOT making this up!) in the huge collider, causing the LHC to overheat.

CERN said that the LHC will be repaired quickly and should be back in full use, later this month. It was only last week that CERN started up the collider again, after it was shut down in September 2008.

Originally Posted by CERN

We believe the bread — a baguette — had been dropped by a bird on an outdoor electrical installation on Monday and caused a disruption to the world's largest particle accelerator.

The spokesperson said the bread, which was "naked and unfilled", had caused a short circuit when dropped on an electrical installation that supplies energy to the massive experiment. While the bird was unconfirmed as the definite culprit, it had been spotted beforehand near the substation carrying bread, said the spokesperson.

The short circuit caused a power failure which affected a quarter of the 27km Large Hadron Collider (LHC) circuit, said the spokesperson. Due to the power cut, Sectors 7-8 and 8-1 had warmed up by three degrees Kelvin (K).

The LHC, which is out of action after a short circuit last September, had been cooled to its operating temperature of 1.9K before the power failure.

The fault had been rectified and the LHC re-cooled to 1.9K, or -271°C, by the end of Thursday, said the spokesperson.

The Large Hadron Collider, which straddles the border of France and Switzerland near Geneva, will become partially operational in the new year. When fully operational, the machine will smash beams of protons into each other in an effort to better understand the fundamental nature of matter, and to search for an elusive scalar elementary particle called the Higgs boson.

Protection systems put in place following a short circuit in September 2008 had reacted to the power cut, said the spokesperson. Had a particle beam been circling the machine, the energy of the beam would have been dumped into graphite blocks encased in concrete. Similarly, an improved quench protection system, installed since last year's short circuit, would have dumped some of the energy stored in the affected sectors of the machine.

Since its first major power-up on 10 September 2008, the LHC has suffered a few setbacks which have halted or slowed its work. In February 2009, physicists Holger B Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya speculated in a paper that accelerators producing large amounts of Higgs particles in the future would in effect halt present attempts to find the particles by permanently scuppering those accelerators, making it impossible to ever detect a Higgs boson.

The Cern spokesperson said on Friday that it was "highly unlikely" a future Higgs boson was foiling present attempts to discover it.

"In my opinion, nature will tell us how nature works," said the spokesperson. "There's no reason to think that the Higgs boson will be easy to find. I have an open opinion, but it's highly unlikely [that Higgs is self-cancelling]."

Originally Posted by GaiaLove (Post 185529)

If the project didnt have potential for sending us all into nowhere it would be comical. The series of delays and problems with the LHC are a message. No ones is listening and everyone may pay the price for that.

They didn't mention the Al-Qaida operative who was an employee of CERN that was arrested last month or the crack they found last year...:mad3:

Originally Posted by no caste (Post 185532)

GaiaLove - I heard about the operative, but not the crack. Do you mean crack like crackhead or crack like fissure?

Originally Posted by GaiaLove (Post 185547)

lol @ crackhead

http://public.web.cern.ch/press/Pres...es/PR14.08.jpg
October 16 2008 Investigations at CERN following a large helium leak into sector 3-4 of the LHC
tunnel have confirmed that cause of the incident was a faulty electrical connection between
two of the accelerator’s magnets. This resulted in mechanical damage and release of helium
from the magnet cold mass into the tunnel.
--more--

Originally Posted by Malletzky (Post 185743)

Hey, I guess that CERN will never work properly, never. It's a feeling I have about this...and, these are not only coincidences...I must agree, there's a message here...but who will listen?

malletzky

Originally Posted by burgundia (Post 190280)

hadron Collider working again....