BONEHEADED thieves have destroyed the brain of Britain’s largest academic
research computer, which was expected to reveal the secrets of the Universe’s
past and future.
The £1.5 million Cosmology Machine at Durham’s Institute for
Computational Cosmology (ICC) began its work in July 2001. It was designed to
simulate how galaxies and solar systems form and evolve, and could perform 456
billion calculations every second—that much work would take a numerate
person a million years.
But on 18 December, thieves broke into the ICC and ruined four of the
computer’s 12 hefty circuit boards while trying to prise them out of the machine…
