Efforts to get the Large Hadron Collider up and running just encountered a temporary snag, reports yesterday’s online edition of The Times of London. A crusty chunk of bread “paralysed a high voltage installation that should have been powering the cooling unit.” That cryogenic facility, guarded by high-security fences, is designed to super-chill the LHC to temperatures approaching absolute zero.
And the official explanation for the out-of-place chunk of starch?
“Nobody knows,” a spokewoman for the CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva told The Times. “The best guess is that it was dropped by a bird, either that or it was thrown out of a passing aeroplane.” Then again, that doesn’t seem to quite comport with the news organization’s explanation about where the bread was found: on an electrical connection inside one of eight above-ground buildings at the site.
