Space and Physics
PUBLISHED
The Large Hadron Collider is one of the biggest scientific achievements in the history of mankind. It's used by the finest scientific and engineering minds this current generation has to offer.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.But, it turns out, they're not so hot on spelling. In fact, staff at the LHC are so bad at spelling, they've misspelled their own name on their website 165 times in the worst way possible.
Yep. The team at CERN keep on spelling Large Hadron Collider as Large Hardon Collider. For those of you who don't know why we are sniggering like schoolchildren, the word "hardon" is slang term for an erect penis.
The typo can be found in all sorts of very scientific documents on the website, providing light relief in otherwise fairly non-comedic pieces of work.
Here they talk about the excellent performance of the Large Hardon Collider, which must be an x-rated side project from CERN that's yet to be announced to the public.
Somewhat delightfully, it also turned up unnoticed in a peer-reviewed paper, in the same sentence as the word "probe".
And it turns out that the Large Hardon Collider is the most powerful particle accelerator ever built. Faster even than the Large Hadron Collider.
In total there are 165 of these, each more penisy than the last. People have been making light of the typos on Twitter.
Whilst others are proposing that CERN knew what they were doing, and had perhaps been sneaking the word "hardon" into their work for their own amusement.
One thing is for certain: We may learn the inner workings of the Higgs Boson before we fully understand why this slipped through their spell-check.
If you'd like to check out the spelling mistakes for yourself and browse through all the times they write "large hardon collider" you can do so here with this Google search.
