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Large Hadron Collider reportedly knocked out by damn pesky weasel

The world’s largest particle accelerator was defeated by small mammal.

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Jay Hathaway

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The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest device for ramming particles into each other at nearly the speed of light, has been knocked offline by a weasel.

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No, not a traitor inside the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN), the Swiss organization that operates the LHC, but an actual weasel. You know: small, cute, sharp teeth, allegedly duplicitous.

A weasel. Or possibly a marten.

The 17-mile-long collider recently ran into electrical problems, and CERN press chief Arnaud Marsollier is “pretty sure” a small animal caused the problem. While CERN initially suspected a weasel, its daily LHC briefing blamed the “severe electrical perturbation” on a “fouine” that damaged some transformer connections.

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And what’s a “fouine”? It’s the French word for this little guy, typically weighing only 3 or 4 pounds.

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“Not the best week for LHC!” the report notes, understatedly. 

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https://twitter.com/fivefifths/status/726079831121760257

The collider was switched on again last year after a long hiatus following the discovery of the Higgs Boson, the elusive, lighter-than-expected “god particle.” LHC’s second run, now in progress, aims to shed light on even smaller particles and trace the history of the universe further back toward the Big Bang. 

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As long as CERN can keep local fauna from disabling the accelerator, anyway. 

This isn’t even the weirdest incident in which an animal has shut down the LHC.  In 2009, a mischievous bird allegedly dropped a baguette into the machine’s electric systems. 

“We are in the countryside, and of course we have wild animals everywhere,” Marsollier said.

https://twitter.com/jonmbutterworth/status/726057450806321152

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H/T NPR

 
The Daily Dot