gathering

Just bad luck?

It made for a funny story a month or so ago when two top physicists published a paper speculating that the Large Hadron Collider might be doomed to failure by the universe itself.
The $9 billion collider, built mostly underground in the Swiss countryside, is designed to seek evidence of the particles created by the Big Bang and offer insights into the birth of the universe itself.
What gathered attention - and laughs - was the physicists' suggestion that the universe would conspire to go back in time to stop the discovery of this very particle, the Higgs boson particle.
Ha ha. Funny stuff, that. Time travel! The universe sending agents back in time to stop the collider from working? Crazy!
The collider was fired up last winter. Before critical speed could be reached, however, an accident occurred and two of the incredibly powerful magnets melted. Millions of dollars had to be spent to repair the unit and get it ready again.
Bad luck, huh? But those kind of setbacks can be expected with something so complicated. Just bad luck.
The collider was fixed and is ready to begin operating at low power again. The ramping up to full speed is expected to take months. The deepest secrets of the workings of the universe may be ours early next year!
And then this happened:
Baguette Dropped From Bird's Beak Shuts Down The Large Hadron Collider (Really) | Popular Science.
A bird with a chunk of bread. A $9 billion hyper-complex machine created to peer into god's soul.
Reports are that the accident, which caused some parts of the collider's accelerator to badly overheat, won't delay the start up date.
But I'd carbon date that bread crumb, just in case...

First Sarah Palin, now this

Astronomers say they have discovered pieces of the known universe moving in one direction at very high speeds, seemingly under the pull of "something" outside of the observable, known universe.
SPACE.com -- Mysterious New 'Dark Flow' Discovered in Space.
The most popular current theories of astrophysics can't explain this movement, which is not in line with the known expansion of the universe. Some massive object, or objects, the researchers speculate, perhaps hundreds of billions of light years away, seems to be pulling at these pieces of the universe.
The implications are manifold: a much older universe than previously thought, or things that travel considerably faster than the speed of light, or multiple universes, or ... well, no one knows.
The article notes that some scientists are calling this movement the "dark flow." Hmmm, sounds suspiciously like the "dark side" to me. Heck, something that could move whole pieces of he universe would be a sizable weapon. It would make the Death Star look like a child's toy - and make Sarah Palin look a lot like, well, Tina Fey.