Photos of the Damage To the Large Hadron Collider

holy_calamity writes "CERN have released images of the damage done to the world's most powerful machine, the Large Hadron Collider, when an electrical fault caused a helium leak. New Scientist has posted them, along with explanations of what you can see. The sudden burst of gas shifted some of the huge superconducting magnets by half a meter, causing at least $21 million in damage."

Comments

Re:Why

[Anonymous Coward]

Odd... articles on Slashdot aren't usually read.

Too bad Congress killed the SSC in Texas...

[Zymergy]

Ah, through the "wisdom" of the US Congress, the SSC (Superconducting Super Collider) was killed over a mere $12 Billion cost savings (which was well under construction just south of Dallas, TX). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider
Some say it was largely due to infighting with 'higher educational interests' back East and in the Chicago area, - but really the answer most likely due to nothing more than Greed and Money.

TO think that The US Federal Government will give taxpayer money to banks et al to the tune of $2 Trillion with NIL oversight and NIL public disclosure is extremely dangerous and shortsighted. ( http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20670001&refer=home&sid=aXNaCKxb.oIs )

We (in the US) could have had something MORE POWERFUL than the LHC here in the US. (As I try not to think about the high-energy physicist brain-drain to France/Switzerland)...
Once upon a time, the US took pride in having the best and coolest toys the world over... (/sigh)

Re:Too bad Congress killed the SSC in Texas...

[pz]

The worst part about the SSC is mentioned in the parent comment's parenthetical comment about brain drain.

When the SSC was cancelled, there was a flood of high-energy physicists who were suddenly out of work. The US lost an entire generation of talent in physics. Instead of continuing on with a remarkable collection of centers of excellence, each themselves breeding excellence, and maintain the intellectual, scientific, technical, and economic advantages that the US Government prides itself on, the (pardon me) boneheads in Congress thought it better to continue the long slog toward mediocrity.

High-energy physics no longer happens in the US (my apologies to readers at LL, LANL, Brookhaven, Fermi, Argonne, Berkeley, and so forth). It happens in Europe and will continue to do so for the forseable future.

Re:Too bad Congress killed the SSC in Texas...

[cmdahler]

I dunno - if I had been in Congress back in 1993 I might have had some doubts about a project that had initially been sold to the government for about $4.5 billion and then ballooned to over three times that amount before the tunnels were even completely dug. There may have been a lot of factors involved in the cancelation of this project, but shutting off a pretty big spigot of wasteful public spending through inept mismanagement and fund milking certainly played a role in Congress' decision. I was living in Dallas at the time and had just graduated a few years before that in physics, so I kept pretty close to all the news stories. The DOE at the time couldn't manage its way out of a wet paper bag, and the wasteful spending and siphoning of funds made the whole thing look like the Big Dig in Boston. To be honest, it's really no wonder Congress canceled the project. At the rate they were going, it would have cost upwards of 20 billion to finish the project, and remember that we were also contributing a huge amount of money to the ISS at the time and had also just come out of a recession, so everyone was real leery about all that money. Wrong time, wrong management, that's ultimately what killed the SSC.

Re:Too bad Congress killed the SSC in Texas...

[idontgno]

And by another odd coincidence, other particle physicists took a detour into Wall Street, where they applied their advanced mathematical knowledge to creating exotic derivatives like Credit Default Swaps

That's the scariest correlation I've heard in a long time.

<Credit Bank VP>: "'Morning, Erwin, how's the CDO hedge working out? Makin' the firm some megabux?"
<Ex-physicist>: "Maybe we did, maybe we didn't."

In the end, the VP opened Erwin Schrödinger's books, collapsed the quantum superposition of mortgage debt obligations, and found that the economy was dead.

Just a Cover Story

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Anyone who has been following these developments closely knows that the "helium leak" is just a cover story for the out of control mini black hole they created when they turned it on. Those magnets were shifted when they were finally able to collapse down the black hole, it went out with a massive gravitation burst (measured by seismographs as far away as the USGS Hawaii Volcano Observatory) that damaged a lot more equipment then they are letting on. Now that they know how dangerous it is, I wouldn't count on them ever turning on the Large Hardon Collider again.