assisonfire

I'm glad the Large Hadron Collider is back in the news. I'd missed hearing about it's proton-mashing mischief. Lets see what it has it been upto lately, eh?

LHC broken by some bread
dropped by a passing bird

Oh... Um. What? Yeah, I know newspaper articles about massive particle physics experiments do have to be somewhat watered down in order to be understood by the layman but do we really need an accompanying picture of a bird? I'm reasonably confident I know what birds are. Although only in a sort of ad-hoc way. If you showed me a picture of a bird and, say, a tree I'd be able to identify the bird on most attempts. However if you sat me down and directly asked me "What are birds?" I would struggle to give an accurate answer. Some kind of animal that flies? Has feathers and sings? Birds? No idea. Not a clue. Although they apparently evolved from dinosaurs so this suggests to me that the only true scientific classification for birds ought to be Dinosaurs In Drag. Transvestisaurus-Rex in a feather boa and wig. They didn't die out, they just all took up Female Impersonation at the same time.

But I'm deviating from the point now, the point is that the Large Hadron Kaleidoscope - the impossibly expensive Doomsday Machine they keep hidden away rolled up in a 17-mile long Swiss Roll near Geneva was taken offline by a bit of bread. I'm not sure how this can even happen. How did the bird get in? Isn't it all underground? How did the bird get the "bit of baguette" in the first place? The search for the enigmatic theoretical Higgs-Boson once again is halted.

This is all very mysterious however, there is one suspect thought to be behind these shenanigans, and let me tell you you're in for a shock...

LHC is sabotaging itself from the future.

Yes, apparently not content with all the idiots clamouring that a atom-sized Black Hole will be opened up and we'll all be sucked into a teeny-tiny Event Horizon the scientists themselves are coming up with some frankly mental ideas.

You see ever since Day 1 the LHC has been beset with any number of problems. There has been the odd explosion here and there knocking out bits and pieces of hyper-expensive hardware and a whole pantheon of failures that have yet to be explained as things went offline and online for no apparent reason. Then there was the Algerian scientist working on the project who was arrested by French anti-terror police because of suspected links to Al-Qaeda, which must have caused a bit of disruption in the office. Most famously, of course, was the "quench" where the superconducting magnets that need to be cooled to -271.1°C (-455.98°F) by liquid helium overheated to the temperature of -263.55°C (-442.39°F) and the fucking thing broke and thousands of tonnes of liquid helium escaped into the tunnels and made all the scientists talk in silly squeaky voices for months afterwards.

It's just one incredibly expensive error after another incredibly expensive mistake which keeps setting back the actual particle smashing back slowly but surely.


Temporary low-budget replacement
The thing to remember, though, is that the LHC is a massive bit of kit. If you thought knocking together some Ikea furniture with an allen-key was a big bit of kit with lots to go wrong that's just peanuts compared to the LHC. The Law of Averages to the power of Murphy's Law cubed x=(LoA √ML³) suggests that for something so mind-bogglingly huge and complex not only if something can go wrong it will go wrong; it already has gone wrong quite some time ago. It will continue to malfunction until the scientists are forced to turn it off and then turn it back on again whereupon the fucking Microsoft Word paperclip will appear and annoy everyone to death.

So then Professor Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Professor Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto - not content with merely joking that it might be cursed - come along with some terrifying mathematics that suggests that the reason so many things have been going wrong is because the creation of the Higgs-Boson is so "abhorrent to nature" the effect of it's coming into being ripples backwards though time and causes a bird to drop a bit of baguette into the magnets.

And this all sounds crazy - and it probably is - but the Higgs Boson is the only missing piece of the puzzle in the Standard Model which has yet to be directly observed by science. If you assume it can exist then it allows all the other sixteen particles to have mass which extends out through the Higgs Field. If it doesn't exist then this causes a problem in all the mathematical formula that explain physical laws as you can't carry the one and so the universe will disappear in a puff of logic. Which might be a problem.

So basically, the Higgs Boson is a suicidal cross between Marty McFly and The Terminator and will go back in time to halt it's own creation. Isn't science amazing?

Incidentally I've just come back from Geneva, I went next week.

Just before I head off out; here is my Halloween costume.

( Who Am I? )