Reminds me of a science-fiction short story that I once read. A team working on a massive particle accelerator built to study some exotic low-energy particle kept having it break down every time they tried to use it. Even if everything was working perfectly, something would fail right before the crucial moment, and stop the experiment dead.

Months of replacing perfectly good parts went by, until they finally figured things out: They had been accidentally destroying the universe, due to the nature of the particles being studied.