Weird Science
Posted in Technology by Steven Hayward
I've been following the progress--or lack thereof--of the CERN Large Hadron Collider (the largest particle accelerator ever built) in Switzerland for a while now, partly because I'm an old and out of practice science geek, and partly because it is another object of technophobia: some worrywarts think the collider, when finally operational, might create an artificial black hole that will annihilate the entire planet. Supposedly it is theoretically possible, but once again this looks like life imitating art, since something of this scenario was depicted in an obscure 1980s-era sci-fi film out of New Zealand called
The Quiet Earth.
Anyway, seems things keep going wrong with the thing, spurring some professional paranoiacs to speculate that time traveling sub-atomic particles from the future are here to prevent us from destroying ourselves with the Hadron Collider. (I'm not making this up.) Now, it seems, a bird dropped a piece of a baguette on the top of the collider and scrambled the thing once again. Don't believe me?
See this article. (Love the artist's depiction.)
1:22 PM / November 6, 2009
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I heard that some are suspicious that there are scientists sabatoging the thing because they are nervous about what will happen. What is interesting to me is that no one claims the black hole or other doomsday events are outside the realm of possibility, yet so few question this project. The entire thing is like a Michael Crichton novel.
Did a scientist train the bird to drop the baguette? No? Maybe it was a robotic bird, sent from the future? This sounds more like Terry Pratchett than Michael Crichton.