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: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.