Bird drops baguette, halts CERN Collider - again
It is the machine that scientists hope will recreate the conditions present at the beginning of time. But scientists at the £3.6bn Large Hadron Collider (LHC) found their plans to emulate the big bang postponed this week when a passing bird dropped a "bit of baguette" into the machine, causing it to overheat.
Cern, the European particle physics laboratory, launched the LHC with much fanfare on 10 September last year. Physicists hope to use the collider to prove the existence of the Higgs boson, or God particle, which gives matter in the universe its mass. But the collider, which when running will collide protons travelling at 99.9% of the speed of light, has been out of action for over a year after a helium leak caused it to be shut down on 19 September 2008, nine days after its start-up.
The particle accelerator, which is buried 100m underground near Geneva, is currently undergoing tests ahead of its proposed restart date later this month, but the testing process was stopped on Monday after the power supply to the collider was cut.
