Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Baguette Leads To Scientific Setback at the Hadron Collider (Maybe God doesn’t want his particle made public.)

The massive machine at the centre of the world's biggest scientific experiment has malfunctioned again – derailed by a bit of bread dropped by a bird. The Hadron Collider, buried 100m under the ground near Geneva, Switzerland, is supposed to recreate conditions seen after the Big Bang. Sections of the machine, which fires protons round a 17-mile-long tunnel at close to the speed of light in order to smash them in to each other, then overheated. The difficulties faced by those working on the project have prompted some members of the scientific community to speculate, in all seriousness, that the machine is sabotaging itself - from the future. The theory is that the particle that physicists hope to produce might be "abhorrent to nature", so that once created it would work backwards through time to put a stop to whatever created it.