A small mammal has sabotaged the world’s most powerful scientific instrument.
The Large Hadron Collider, a 17-mile superconducting machine designed to smash protons together at close to the speed of light, went offline overnight. Engineers investigating the mishap found the charred remains of a furry creature near a gnawed-through power cable.
The shutdown comes as the LHC was preparing to collect new data on the Higgs Boson, a fundamental particle it discovered in 2012. The Higgs is believed to endow other particles with mass, and it is considered to be a cornerstone of the modern theory of particle physics.
There have been previous incidents, including one in 2009, when a bird is believed to have dropped a baguette onto critical electrical systems.
Nor are the problems exclusive to the LHC: In 2006, raccoons conducted a "coordinated" attack on a particle accelerator in Illinois.
It is unclear whether the animals are trying to stop humanity from unlocking the secrets of the universe.
It's a conspiracy!
ReplyDeleteThey're smarter and more devious than we think.
DeleteLOL
ReplyDeleteLOL
ReplyDeleteA weasel, huh?
ReplyDelete"WOLVERINES!"
This article is of particular interest to ME, because my personal Toshiba "Satellite" C75D-B laptop computer is used to continuously analyze raw data for several scientific research projects, including the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), projects which are distributed through Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) at the University of California in Berkeley.
These assorted scientific research projects run in the background on my computer's hard drive twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, using only a minimum of disk space, and do NOT interfere with any of my other normal activities I engage in with my computer, such as watching movies, listening to music, composing e-mails, reading the news, and/or solving crossword puzzles, cryptograms, and codeword puzzles (crossword puzzles without clues).
Originally, I was motivated to volunteer my computer in the BOINC research projects by the opportunity to help analyze raw data being collected by the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), and that eventually inspired me to also sign up for participation in these other projects, such as seeking cures for disease, solutions for clean water, clean air, climate control, et cetera.
I'm very pleased with every opportunity to inform folks about these opportunities, in hopes that even more people will volunteer their own personal computers to analyze data.
Who knows - - - , maybe it will be YOUR computer that will discover the cure for cancer, or communicate with intelligent beings on a distant planet!