The LHC is recovering from a serious overheating problem, caused by a piece of stale bread dropped by a bird onto an apparently unprotected thermal vent. Impossible, you say?
Not impossible. I used to bulls-eye whomp rats in my T-16 back home.
While it’s not about to be mistaken for a moon any time soon, the Large Hadron Collider probably is the closest thing we’ve got to the Death Star. With miles of passages, the capability to destroy a planet, and a bunch of people dressed in white scooting around inside, it’s actually a pretty good fit. So it’s no surprise that it has the same weakness. Concerned only with interference from cosmic radiation and nearby townspeople, the structure was built underground — but they didn’t count on the possibility of a small one-man fighter armed with the Force a clumsy bird with a bit of baguette making the trench run and hitting it where the least expected it.
The absurdity of this failure (though it apparently won’t affect the re-activation) makes me think that maybe the LHC really is so abhorrent to nature that the universe is contriving to snuff it out.
[via PopSci]
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