LHC Broken… Again.

Hey, remember when the Large Hadron Collider was finally working and was the most powerful particle accelerator in the world?

That was a pretty cool like 10 minutes, huh?

Yup. Sure is broken again now, though. Which leaves me wondering – is the LHC perhaps… not even  a particle accelerator at all? Is it just a huge experiment designed to test the gullibility of the world’s nerd population? Could the folks at CERN really be that cruel?

 

BANG!

It works! The Large Hadron Collider has, for the first time in it’s young, trouble plagued life, produced and recorded high-energy proton collisions.

And we’re all still here.

So… this is sort of anti-climatic, but, you know, way to keep existing, world as we know it.

Um, carry on, I guess?

 

No Regrets

The LHC starts up in earnest next week! Of course, you know that can mean only one thing – the instant and inveitable end of all life everywhere, forever. So, I really hope everyone has a nice couple of days in what little meantime we have left.

For my own part, I have spent one of the last few days the world will exist doing data entry. Luckily, I probably won’t have time to question this course of action before we’re all sucked into non-existence just before Thanksgiving. So that’s something.

 

When Animals Attack Science

The latest problem to crop up unexpectedly at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider? A bird dropped a piece of bread on some machinery outside of it, causing significant overheating. For those of you playing along at home, this means the most sensitive and advanced piece of scientific equipment ever known to man is not only vulnerable to terrorists – it can’t even protect itself from pigeons.

The collider wasn’t operational at the time, because that would have required the collider to be operational at some point, but if it had been working when it was attacked by the highly advanced warfare of a bird carrying some bread, fail safes would have shut it down.

 

At what point do we give up and just turn this thing into the world's biggest, coolest Laser Tag arena?

 

Remember though – its distinctly possible this bird was a double agent, dispatched by the folks at ConCERNed to stop the LHC before it kills us all. They have a lawsuit alleging that turning the machine on is a violation of the human rights of the entire world coming before the UN, but I think we all know how effective the UN is in these matters. Could it be that ConCERNed is using an army of trained animals to covertly take matters into it’s own hands?

Hey, it’s not the least likely theory on why the LHC remains broke-ass down. That would be the recently published paper on how the collider is being sabotaged. From the future. By God. Which, it turns out, actually may not be as crazy as it sounds.

Though in all fairness: It’s really hard for anything to be as crazy as that sounds.

 

Calling One Eye Eagle

Attention, Print Journalism: You are going out of business because you are fucking boring. Take, for example, the headline from the Financial Times regarding the trial of a nuclear researcher at Cern, home of the soon-to-be-turned-on-and-either-explain-everything-or-kill-us-all Large Hadron Collider.’Scientist at Cern appears before anti-terrorism judge‘ just doesn’t capture how really and truly bone chilling this story has every right to be. I mean sure, Adlene Hicheur wasn’t exactly designing nuclear death machines or anything. He was, by all accounts, just a run of the mill 32-year-old French particle physicist who wrote data analysis formulae for the world’s largest broken super collider and may or may not have wanted to make some places in France explode in rather dramatic fashion.

But really, this is a story ripped directly from the pages of todays comic books! A job for Nick Fury himself, and even the New York Times can’t do better than ‘Nuclear Scientist Under Terror Inquiry’ here?

At the risk of sounding like a sensationalist, I think ‘Al Qaeda Operative Infiltrates Black Hole Machine’ would have sold some fucking newspapers. But hell, what do I know?