Serious Magnet Failure at CERN's New Accelerator

GrepNut writes "CERN is reporting that the giant magnets that steer the particle beam in the new and highly anticipated Large Hadron Collider have just failed catastrophically in a stress test, apparently due to a design oversight. It doesn't help that the magnets were designed and built by CERN's US competitor Fermilab." While safety precautions were followed, and no one was injured nor were any rifts in the space-time continuum opened, it's still a rather large setback for the project.

Comments

redundant

[smoker2]

Who the fuck tagged this "news" and "science" ?

It's on a news site in the science section !

WTF ?

Re:worst case scenario

[l0cust]

I was agreeing with you before your post went crazy like Tarantino midway through 'From Dusk till Dawn'.

Human's in their everlasting quest for knowledge and other 'enrichment' seems to be consistent in messing things up that work perfectly and make it a dangerous object. It happens at home when the man of the house thinks he can fix his own brakes and then seems to be messing around with it for several hours to the collection of us sentient beings messing up all types of natural systems including our own food and other supply chains (water, air, ...)

Do you mean to say everything was perfect before humans started tinkering with things trying to understand how they work? As much as I am a pro-nature guy, I hate when people try to paint humans as the root of each and every problem and something which was thrown right in the center of this nature circus from some Alien world. We are a product and one of many parts of this very natural system, and through us its the system which is trying to understand itself.

Its ironic how you gave that example of a man trying to fix the brakes on his own, if it was not for people like him we would still be swinging from tree to tree. Not a bad life except that you wouldn't have the option of complaining about it on some internet forum.

Re:Anti US Slant

[Asic Eng]

No, putting the blame for a specific problem on some US organization is not "anti US". Everybody makes mistakes, and it's good engineering practice to accept responsibility for them when that happens. Fermilab thinks that the problem occured on their side, and they are trying to solve it.

Working in a multi-national company with multi-national customers and designing safety-critical systems, I have some experience with handling mistakes. The best approach solving these technical issues, is to keep political games at bay as much as possible. Investigate thoroughly, take responsibility if you own the problem, then work on solving it. Once you start thinking "it's just that the other guys hate us" you've already lost. Any discussion will turn into a political slugfest, and lots of time will be wasted. The flipside is that you also need to keep good records - if someone tries to blame you for something you didn't do, you should have material to nip that in the bud. That works much better once you've gained a reputation for owning up to your own problems, btw.

Re:Give me a break

[Theaetetus]

Windows is far, far more complex than a magnet, or any other physical thing ever built.

I disagree, and offer the ISS, the Internet, the Pentium that Windows is running upon, an Oil drilling platform, CERN, etc.

The point is, software programming is at the stage where electrical engineering was a century ago: tinkerers, with no real standards, trying new things. Sometimes they work, sometimes they explode. It was an exciting time, but it wasn't engineering. That didn't happen until standards came about, and at that point, we went from lightbulbs to radar installations.

Re:Anti US Slant

[Asic Eng]

Putting the blame on another organization without having conducted a thorough investigation _is_ "anti US".

At the very most it would be "anti that other organization".

Actually - Fermilab thinks no such thing.

Yes, they do. It's their press release, and their current thinking is that it's their fault. They may be mistaken, and probably hope they are, but they think it's their fault.

CERN _is_ making gratuitous :anti US" statements.

As pointed out many times in this discussion: the text posted at CERN's website was written by Fermilab. That's indicated by the title "Fermilab Statement on LHC Magnet Test Failure".

CERN *had* to have reviewed the magnet design

Well, I'm not familiar with the processes they use, but in my field a review is a way to help the designer, the designer still owns any defects which were not found in the review. In any case, CERN is not playing political games by posting Fermilab's statements.