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.
NPR Story missed this one (Score:5, Interesting)
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:suffocation (Score:2, Interesting)
Homeland Security is looking at regulating pizza drivers now.
Any missing physicists? (Score:2, Interesting)
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]
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.
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:suffocation (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Units? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Reminds me of George Goble (Score:1, Interesting)
Some of us born even earlier than you did a double take on this thread, because we couldn't figure out why George Gobel [wikipedia.org], the guy who asked Johnny Carson, after following Bob Hope and Dean Martin on The Tonight Show, "Did you ever get the feeling that the world was a tuxedo and you were a pair of brown shoes?" would pull a stunt like that, let alone have a license plate that said "UNIX"