God Awful Things

The LHC, plagued with problems time and time again, possibly by Higgs bosons traveling back through time to prevent their discovery?

Oh sure it seems far fetched.. and just two days ago ramping up over 1 _trillion_ volts [discovery.com], but of course, something went wrong again!

Via The Register:

It appears that a failure occurred at 01:23 Swiss time this morning in an 18,000-volt power line at the Meyrin site above the mighty collider’s subterranean circuit. This caused a power cut across the site, shutting down the main computer centre among other things and causing an abrupt cessation of operations.

However according to CERN controllers and the publicly-viewable web readouts (now back online) the LHC’s magnets stayed chilled down to their operating temperature, just 1.9 degrees above absolute zero – colder than deep space. This is critical, as re-chilling the magnets had they warmed beyond a certain point would have been a lengthy and involved process.

You can read the rest here.

“Maybe it was a birdy bread-bomber from the future,” jokes Chris Stephens of the LHC Portal – referring to the well-known wingnut theory that that the mere possibility of the LHC unmasking certain phenomena engenders forces which act backwards through time to sabotage it before this can happen.

We ourselves find it hard not to suspect the involvement of some pan-dimensional police force, seeking to prevent humanity acquiring parallel-universe portal capability before we’re ready to use it responsibly. ®