The LHC is housed in a 27-kilometre-circumference tunnel under the French-Swiss border.
Credit: CERN
GENEVA: A peckish bird briefly knocked out part of the world's biggest atom smasher by causing a chain reaction with a piece of bread, CERN said Monday.
Bits of a French loaf dropped on an external electrical power supply caused a short circuit last week, triggering failsafe devices that shut down part of the cooling system of the giant experiment to probe the secrets of the universe, reported the the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN).
Short circuit
The system was restored several hours after the incident last Tuesday while the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider was barely affected, a spokeswoman said. "The bird escaped unharmed but lost its bread."
"On Tuesday 3 November, a bird carrying a baguette bread caused a short circuit in an electrical outdoor installation that serves sectors 7-8 and 8-1 of the LHC," the organisation added. "The knock-on effects included an interruption to the operation of the LHC cryogenics system."
The 27 kilometre-long particle collider, which runs in a circular tunnel under the French-Swiss border near the city of Geneva, has been plagued by problems since it was briefly started up in September 2008.
No change to restart schedule
However, CERN said the latest incident was minor and did not affect attempts to restart the accelerator later this month following repairs.
"It made for a small warming from absolute zero [-273 ºC] on the Celsius scale to -268 ºC, but the machine was not stopped," said CERN spokesman Renilde Vanden Broek. "Everything returned to normal a few hours later and operations were able to resume in the night of November 5," she added.
Designed to shed light on the origins of the universe, the LHC at CERN took nearly 20 years to complete and cost six billion Swiss francs (US$4.9 billion) to build.
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atom smasher
mad scientists creating a beast that could cause harm. Thank you bird
Headline
When I saw the headline, I thought that it meant the bird had eaten the atom smasher. An amusing double meaning there.
It is slightly scary that a bird could knock this thing out, considering how much money was spent on it.
The problem is with the
The problem is with the French beguette. Make the production of beguettes illegal and the collieder will be a smashing
success.
Absolute Wrong
In the article a scientist states that the temp of "absolute zero" (0 degrees on the Kelvin scale)was achieved. That is incorrect. Science has come close but still has not reached "absolute zero." Since that temp means that ALL atomic motion has ceased, their are many who believe it is impossible to reach absolute zero.
hot and cold
The LHC is not only the coldest place in our solar system but also the hottest. The quark-gluon plasma in the collision chambers ALICE and ATLAS will produce temperatures several hundred thousand times hotter than the surface of the sun.
Black Hole is safe
At least theres no chance located there of the black hole growing by swallowing more and more stuff, I mean if you were a black hole that could eat anything on Earth would you eat French food?