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Bad Math Causes Explosion at CERN Collider 270
javipas writes "The Large Hadron Collider at the CERN has suffered a big explosion deep inside that has caused a leak of hellium gas and the quick evacuation of everyone working there. The reason: a mathematical mistake that affected the design of the giant superconductive magnets made by Fermilab. Now the company will have to repair and upgrade the 24 magnets that are installed on the 27 km. circunference of one of the most important research centers on Earth." This story might seem strangely familiar to you.
Forgetting... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Forgetting... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Forgetting... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Forgetting... (Score:5, Funny)
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W0rd, man.
Almost success! (Score:5, Funny)
Eh, sounds partially successful.
Re:Almost success! (Score:5, Funny)
click!
Operator, this is not a
click!
bob - Bill have you called the police?
bill - Of course bob, they hanging up.
bob - What? Call again.
bill - Damnit bob I sound like a chipmunk, you call this time.
NPR Story missed this one (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:NPR Story missed this one (Score:5, Informative)
Not really. The most powerful cosmic ray particles ever observed, which have are millions of times more energy than anything we can create, each have approximately the force of a thrown baseball. Perhaps *all* of the particles in the ring together have the energy of a moving bus.
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I'd be willing to bet that a thrown bus accelerates much more slowly than a thrown baseball.
Seriously, though, F = M*A. Without a discussion of the acceleration of the bus, you can't even guess at the force. If the bus is traveling
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But at any rate, then for definition #3, we're talking about mass and velocity, and the distinction still appplies.
/Sorry for being such a pedant, but it's Monday morning, compounded by a nasty sugar hangover from Easter candy.
Re:NPR Story missed this one (Score:5, Informative)
Re:NPR Story missed this one (Score:4, Funny)
Fluff piece? (Score:2)
After a minute of searc
The real reason... (Score:4, Funny)
The Great Mistake of '08 was no accident (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:The Great Mistake of '08 was no accident (Score:4, Funny)
Well, there's your problem! (Score:4, Funny)
Helium leak? (Score:4, Funny)
suffocation (Score:5, Informative)
What's so bad about that?
What's bad is that it displaces all the oxygen in the area. This was a common cause of occupational deaths in MRI rooms- not flying metal objects attracted to the magnet (though a very small number of people have been killed by oxygen tanks and such.) An MRI repair tech was killed because of a slow helium leak that lowered the oxygen percentage enough that he passed out. That's why most if not all MRI facilities have gas monitors that monitor oxygen, nitrogen, and helium levels (liquid nitrogen is also used.)
MRI machines have vents for this sort of thing. Also because if the magnet quenches, a LARGE amount of liquid helium will boil off; all the electrical energy used to generate the field, which is constantly running in the magnet, turns very quickly into thermal energy. If the vent wasn't there, the room would pressurize, preventing one from opening doors (even an outward opening door- enough force would make it impossible to overcome friction on the bolt.) Magnet quenches are done only in situations where someone's life is in immediate danger (say, they're trapped by a ferrous object and about to bleed out) because of the danger (and the fact that there's a 1:4 chance of destroying the multi-million-dollar magnet and boiling off thousands of gallons of very expensive liquid hydrogen.)
It's been reported in vent failures when a magnet quenched that it rained oxygen; liquid helium is substantially colder than liquid oxygen. Shit happens: vent valves fail, birds nest in stuff, someone says "hey, what's that big empty pipe for" 6 rooms over and cuts it/blocks it off, etc. I think the MRI tech was killed because of a leaking o-ring.
Are they just afraid no one will take them seriously if they sound like the chipmunks when they report their findings?
Picture one guy yelling "Run, run! We'll all suffocate!" in a chipmunk voice, and everyone else laughing at how funny he sounds, and passing out. And dying.
I mean, it's not like it's spraying O2 in the direction of the pilot light of their oven.
Oxygen spraying in the direction of a pilot light in an oven will do nothing except make the pilot light burn at a higher temperature. It will not cause an explosion, because there's nothing else combustible in the oven, unless it's REALLY greasy.
What is not a joking matter is smoking in high-oxygen environments or fires in spacecraft, because they do have lots of flammable stuff, like wire insulation (which is fire-resistant, not necessarily fire-proof.)
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Homeland Security is looking at regulating pizza drivers now.
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I haven't tried it, but a couple of folks I know well enough to believe they probably have, report that soaking a charcoal briquette (as for a barbecue) in LOX and then throwing it against something hard can be pretty impressive, in the "stick of dynamite" range. A LOX-soaked charcoal briquette doesn't sound like something I'd want to pick up, myself.
I have seen someone light a cigarette that had been briefly dipped in LOX (it was in a clamp, h
Oblig. YouTube link to the video (Score:4, Informative)
Here's a YouTube link to the video. I don't think barbecue is the right word...try incinerate.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBLr_XrooLs [youtube.com]
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That sounds very familiar. [wikipedia.org]
Re:suffocation (Score:5, Interesting)
On a somewhat lighter note (since no one was hurt), an MR tech colleague of mine recounted the story (which I may be mangling a bit) of an intentional quench of an MRI at the facility where she worked previously. (I believe the magnet was either being decommissioned, or at least being moved to a different building -- regardless, they needed to release the helium).
Apparently, they put out an announcement that morning (and earlier in the week), notifying everyone at the facility that the quench would be occurring at some specified time, and not to be alarmed. One of the senior researchers had been away at a conference for a few days, and arrived just as the quench was occurring. As they opened the vents to the roof and released the liquid helium, the suddenly-expanding cold gas shot up in column for a bit, condensing moisture in the air around it, before expanding out, and forming a wider ball.
Needless to say, this researcher was quite shocked to get back to work in time to see a mushroom cloud over the building.
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The only spacecraft that used a pure O2 environment were the US Mercury through Apollo-Skylab series. It's worth noting that even the pre-fire Apollo spacecraft materials were fire-resistant in the designed-for pure O2 atmosphere -- because the designed-for atmosphere was 3 PSI, not the 16 PSI (pure O2!) that they were using in the pre-launch plugs out test where t
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Did they manage to redirect the result to standard out?
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At high oxygen concentrations, People will burn. Sorry to be so morbid, but there it is.
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Others have detailed what's so bad about this, but it is worth pointing out that experimental science is in general a dangerous enterprise.
Experimental physicists routinely handle dangerous materials (a colleague once worked on a project where he was using hydrofluoric acid, which has to be one of the nastiest substances known.) We also deal with pressure vessels (another colleague working on high pressure proportional counters considered explosions a routine part of his testing pr
OOPS! (Score:3, Funny)
Some real information (Score:5, Informative)
http://user.web.cern.ch/user/QuickLinks/Announcem
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May I pass along my congratulations for your great interdimensional breakthrough. I am sure, in the miserable annals of the
Information? (Score:2)
While the full cause of the problem is not yet known, failure to account for the asymmetric loads in the engineering design of the magnet appears to be a likely cause. The test configuration corresponds to conditions that occur during a magnet quench, when a superconducting magnet suddenly "goes normal," releasing large amounts of energy. They may also occur during magnet cooldown and during certain other conditions such as refrigerator failure.
I consider myself reasonably technical, but I find this "information" pretty fucking opaque. Did somebody forget to plug in the refrigerator? You can hardly blame the "popular press" for failing to penetrate this kind of clunkspeak.
Translation (Score:3, Insightful)
The linked article, which has more useful information in each paragraph than the entire original article from the story submission, is a little technical. Lemme try and simplify the important parts:
The magnets are chilled with liquid helium to keep the temperature near absolute
Units? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Units? (Score:4, Interesting)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider [wikipedia.org]
They should have listened (Score:5, Funny)
Re:They should have listened (Score:4, Funny)
Ah, it's All about the Higgs Boson (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Ah, it's All about the Higgs Boson (Score:4, Interesting)
It's bound to be more fun that way.
Of course governments will be freaked that they spent so much money to prove something and failed to do it, but that entirely misses the point. What makes trying to prove our basic assumptions about the universe worthwhile is the small possibility that they're wrong in some fundamental and important way. I for one look forward to the day when some big shot physicists hold a press conference and announce, "You know what we've been telling all along about [perpetual motion/faster than light travel/anti-gravity/time travel]? Well, it turns out not to be entirely, precisely true." How cool would that be?
It'll be a big ho-hum if they announce that they've found the Higgs Boson exactly the way they expected with exactly the observations they predicted.
Re:Ah, it's All about the Higgs Boson (Score:4, Funny)
However, of the many infinite realities which do not exist, those in which Free Sandwich buttons were possible became filled with sandwiches soon after their initial springing-forth, nilling the potential for all other life, and so clearly the Anthropic principle takes over.
Of course, this is a flawed argument anyway, since as far as we know, and free sandwich button could probably not produce sandwiches at a rate which would cause a sandwich queue to expand at faster than the speed of light, and would probably collapse into a delicious but deadly black hole before expanding to reality-threatening magnitudes. I think the argument's concept is clear and reasonable, however.
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the button, when pressed creates one sandwich and one antisandwich
you can only eat one kind of sandwich or you will get horrible heartburn.
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What's more, it can be demonstrated in a universe with negative mass sandwiches, information can travel backwards in time by the following argument:
(1) The sandwiches will have mustard or mayo.
(2) The mustard/mayoness of a sandwich will initially be in an indeterminate state.
(3) When you bite into the sandwich the wave function will collapse into mustard or mayo
(4) By Murphy's Law, yo
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if you are hungry now you don't want to wait 50 billion years and travel 16 light millenia due north to get a sandwich, you want it now, and a couple feet in front of you, on the desk
you also need the button to be sure they don't form too close and explode
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Gadzooks! (Score:4, Funny)
Hellium? No wonder there was an explosion! (Score:2, Funny)
What kind of leak? (Score:4, Funny)
Jesus christ!
Good thing no one was hurt (Score:2)
Good thing no one was hurt! Would hate to think that someone was once again killed by theoretical physics and bad calculus. Please tell me this wasn't another traditional to metric conversion problem.... What's with runnimg from the cloud of Helium, were they scared of sounding funny while describing on TV what the explosion sounded like? Would be funny to hear the chipmunks describing an accident at the nuclear/quantum research facility. I know I know, nothing quite like a cloud of radiactive, poten
Deja boom (Score:2)
Any missing physicists? (Score:2, Interesting)
Time to get the eyes checked (Score:5, Funny)
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Bad Math Causes Explosion at CERN Collider (Score:2, Funny)
Helium is not friendly! (Score:3, Insightful)
Something smells fishy (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Something smells fishy (Score:4, Informative)
CERN is a continuation of what Fermilab has been working on, not a rival.
The CAPTCHA is "footstep". Appropriate. CERN is following in Fermilab's footsteps (and then going quite a bit further).
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Once could equally easily invert this; CERN, Fermilab's competition and responsible for reviewing and approving the design, managed to miss a fundemental flaw in the design. Plenty of blame to go around here on both sides of the Atlantic.
Nothing smells fishy (Score:2)
If you read Fermilab's press release, you'll note that Fermi and CERN followed proper procedures, with Fermi running reviews including both CERN and third party labs. NOBODY seems to have caught this. So if someone does want to propagate conspiracy theories, they'll need a wider net than merely inter-lab rivalry.
[Egging them on dept: I suggest watching _National Treasure_ a few times; there are lots of hidden clues in there. Good thing people
Obligatory Office Space (Score:3, Funny)
When Physicists screw up... (Score:3, Interesting)
When physicists screw up, they certainly do it spectacularly. Though I don't think this quite rises to the level of the Castle Bravo "oops" [wikipedia.org]
Inaccurate article (Score:2)
CERN Collider explosion pros and cons (Score:3, Funny)
Cons: Headcrabs everywhere.
Spelling (Score:2)
"the 27 km. circunference"
"that has caused a leak of hellium gas " (Score:2)
Bad math causes explosions? (Score:2)
Coincidence? (Score:2)
I think not...
T-Shirts now on sale (Score:2)
Re:Obligatory... (Score:4, Funny)
Don't you mean
I for one, welcome our new accidental parallel universe overlords...
I for one, welcome our new accidental parallel universe overlords...
I for one, welcome our new accidental parallel universe overlords...
I for one, welcome our new accidental parallel universe overlords...
I for one, welcome our new accidental parallel universe overlords...
I for one, welcome our new accidental parallel universe overlords...
Not a Dupe (Score:5, Informative)
From one of the articles in your link: The old story was that stuff blew up. The new story is why it blew up so we don't make the same mistakes. Turns out it, was just bad math. It wasn't that we didn't understand some physics, it wasn't the gods being mad, it was just plan old avoidable bad math.
A somber and depressing article for the
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In theory, all mistakes are avoidable. The problem is avoiding them.,
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Super Conducting Super Collider (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.rootsweb.com/~txecm/super_collider.htm [rootsweb.com]
http://motls.blogspot.com/2006/03/ssc-and-clinton
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Sorry, you are in the wrong place, parallel universe is the next thread down.
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What's Getting Cancelled To Pay to Fix This? (Score:4, Interesting)
This reminds me of the accident at the Princeton TFTR when it was being installed. The fusion reactor used huge flywheels to store sufficient power to operate the tokamak (without pulling down the electric grid). During installation, a contractor dropped one of the flywheels from an overhead crane.
To fix the flywheel, congress cancelled almost every other fusion research project in the country. This was when, for example, the EFBT project at NASA was cancelled - despite having results as or more promising than tokamak research.
(My plasma sciences professor at college had previously led the EFBT project; the story is repeated from him.)
I wonder what dozen other less-well-known research projects are going to get canned to fix this high-profile mistake, and what breakthroughs we'll lose because of it.
Re:Not a Dupe (Score:5, Informative)
If you had to explain it at an 8th grade level (as newspapers aim for these days), you'd say "bad math". If you are on a nerd site like Slashdot, I'd hope we wouldn't need to make that simplification. The story is a dupe. It is still the same as before - the assymmetrical load was not put into the requirements for the magnets and overlooked during four internal and *external* reviews. CERN had all the right data, and they overlooked that specific test too.
There is a committee reviewing the case, and their findings will be released April 24 (tentatively). FNAL's goal is to have this not delay turn-on at all, although it'll cost some amount of money to fix. They hope the repairs can be made in-ground. The absolute worst-case would be if they have to take the magnets up to the surface to fix them; that will certainly cause a time delay.
Right now, they suspect it's an additional cost, but not a delay for the November turn-on. That picture could get worse, but we won't know until around May.
Lots of the world's top particle physicists have been on this project for many years; any country capable of doign "other" research is certainly already heavily involved with the LHC. The only possible project which will benefit from the delay is the Tevatron at FNAL, but we're probably 18 months from running the LCG at Tevatron levels (it will take *at least* a year to begin to get all the bugs worked out and tunings done to a multi-billion dollar system).
One delay will be noise compared to the amount of effort needed to prove the existence of the Higgs.
Re:Not a Dupe (Score:4, Informative)
The goal at CERN and Fermilab is now to redesign and repair the inner triplet magnets and, if necessary, the DFBX without affecting the LHC start-up schedule. Teams at CERN and Fermilab have identified potential repairs that could be carried out expeditiously without removing undamaged triplet magnets from the tunnel.. All three of the pressure-tested triplet magnets at Point 5, plus the associated DFBX, will be removed from the tunnel for inspection and, if necessary, repair. CERN will manage the redesign and repair effort and has scheduled a review for April 24-25 to validate the selected method. Fermilab will take part in the review. Repair of the triplet magnets would begin after validation by the reviewers. The immediate goal is to have a repaired triplet in another sector of the accelerator ready to participate in a pressure test scheduled for June 1.
Primary sources are always better than some guy commenting. [web.cern.ch]
Re:DUPE (Score:5, Funny)
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The magnet's failure created ripples that extended through time. We are seeing the first one coinciding with us. Expect to read the same post next week as the second ripple reaches us.
Also, you will remember the ripple that also propagated into your past, about a week before the accident. Next week, you will remember the second one, two weeks before the accident.
Re:Proton? (Score:5, Funny)
Just think how much money they'd be saving if they were looking at amateur-tons.
(With my apologies to Piers Anthony)
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I hate to think of how this kind of a mix up just convinces certain people even more of their anti-science prejudices.
People with "anti-science" prejudices, are generally not the type that will appreciate a replication of the big-bang. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton [wikipedia.org] more importantly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_Boson [wikipedia.org] the Higgs boson particle is being sought in order to prove large portions of string theory.
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Re:John Titor delayed (Score:5, Funny)
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