Baguettes from the future probably made Latour’s day
Seems like the two scientists who hypothesized that the LHC is sabotaged from the future were right…
The rehabilitation of the beleaguered Large Hadron Collider was on hold tonight after the failure of one of its powerful cooling units caused by an errant chunk of baguette.
Sorry what?
The £4 billion particle-collider faced more than a year of delays after a helium leak stymied the project in its first few days of operation. It is gradually being switched back on over the coming months but suffered a new setback on Tuesday morning.
Scientists at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva noticed that the system’s carefully monitored temperatures were creeping up.
Further investigation into the failure of a cryogenic cooling plant revealed an unusual impediment. A piece of crusty bread had paralysed a high voltage installation that should have been powering the cooling unit.
Just amazing. Jokes apart, this is a minor setback, but hugely bad press for the LHC people… I can imagine their faces when they found out, telling each other: ‘Holy shit, what the hell are we going to say to the press??’
And so:
A spokesman for CERN told The Times: ‘Nobody knows how it got there. The best guess is that it was dropped by a bird, either that or it was thrown out of a passing aeroplane’
Ah, Latour would LOVE this story wouldn’t he?
Fabio Cunctator
Hi Fabio,
I hate being out of the loop, so do you mind explaining the Latour reference? Thanks.
Very briefly put, Latour’s actor-network theory implies that in the total economy of a scientific enterprise (and a large scale experiment such as the one at the LHC is a perfect example) we must consider the role of nonhuman objects as being as infulential as the role of human scientists.
Every scientific experiment is a long and troublesome negotiation between a large netowrk of contrasting actors defined by their relations, and that *exist* in the measure that they influence other actors. Electrons, telescopes, bunsen burners, scientists, helium leaks and baguettes all contribute as actors on equal footing in the development of scientific research (or in Latour’s words ‘science in action’), whose truth will be the product of a chain of interactions, negotiations and resistences between all of these actors.
The baguette is an example of the power of a simgle nonhuman actant over the incredibly complex network of actors which is the collider at CERN.