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Time traveler has come to stop Large Hadron Collider


justin0469

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http://crave.cnet.co.uk/gadgets/0,39029552,49305387,00.htm

A would-be saboteur arrested today at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland made the bizarre claim that he was from the future. Eloi Cole, a strangely dressed young man, said that he had travelled back in time to prevent the LHC from destroying the world.

The LHC successfully collided particles at record force earlier this week, a milestone Mr Cole was attempting to disrupt by stopping supplies of Mountain Dew to the experiment's vending machines. He also claimed responsibility for the infamous baguette sabotage in November last year.

Mr Cole was seized by Swiss police after CERN security guards spotted him rooting around in bins. He explained that he was looking for fuel for his 'time machine power unit', a device that resembled a kitchen blender.

Police said Mr Cole, who was wearing a bow tie and rather too much tweed for his age, would not reveal his country of origin. "Countries do not exist where I am from. The discovery of the Higgs boson led to limitless power, the elimination of poverty and Kit-Kats for everyone. It is a communist chocolate hellhole and I'm here to stop it ever happening."

This isn't the first time time-travel has been blamed for mishaps at the LHC. Last year, the Japanese physicist Masao Ninomiya and Danish string-theory pioneer Holger Bech Nielsen put forward the hypothesis that the Higgs boson was so "abhorrent" that it somehow caused a ripple in time that prevented its own discovery.

The baguette story:

Yet another bizarre accident has befallen the Large Hadron Collider. The enormous particle accelerator, buried deep beneath France and Switzerland, overheated when it was invaded by a piece of baguette, apparently dropped by a bird.

The Register reports that the bread entered machinery above ground. Honestly, they've spent over £3.5bn on the thing, you'd think CERN could afford a tarpaulin, or perhaps a Wendy house.

We're not ones for crude for national stereotyping, but the detail that the bird dropped a bit of baguette suggests this must have occurred on the French side of the LHC. It's unclear whether the bird was actually riding a bike, or indeed wearing onions and a beret.

The piece of bread caused the system to overheat to almost 8 Kelvin. Normal operating temperature is 1.9K. Had the LHC been turned on, this temperature spike would have shut down the system to prevent it approaching the 9.6K mark at which the niobium-titanium magnets quench, or stop superconducting. When this occurs, they revert to being ordinary magnets, turning the LHC into the world's biggest and most expensive toaster.

If the LHC was a sitcom, it would be written by Graham Linehan and it would be our favourite show. Interestingly, the head of the LHC computing-grid is one Ian Bird. Coincidence? We don't think so. Having failed to break the LHC during computer-related stress testing, conspiracy theorists may suspect Bird has turned to baked goods.

In fact, the increasingly bizarre incidents befalling the LHC are making us suspect the staff long ago realised the blessed thing wasn't going to work, and are having to come up with ever-more elaborate excuses. Our suspicions will no doubt be confirmed when Brian Cox tells New Scientist the cat ate his calculus.

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