Big Bang at the atomic lab after scientists get their maths wrong


Recommended Posts

A ?2 billion project to answer some of the biggest mysteries of the universe has been delayed by months after scientists building it made basic errors in their mathematical calculations.

The mistakes led to an explosion deep in the tunnel at the Cern particle accelerator complex near Geneva in Switzerland. It lifted a 20-ton magnet off its mountings, filling a tunnel with helium gas and forcing an evacuation.

It means that 24 magnets located all around the 17-mile circular accelerator must now be stripped down and repaired or upgraded. The failure is a huge embarrassment for Fermilab, the American national physics laboratory that built the magnets and the anchor system that secured them to the machine.

It appears Fermilab made elementary mistakes in the design of the magnets and their anchors that made them insecure once the system was operational.

Last week an apparently furious and embarrassed Pier Oddone, director of Fermilab, wrote to his staff saying they had caused “a pratfall on the world stage”. He said: “We are dumb-founded that we missed some very simple balance of forces. Not only was it missed in the engineering design but also in the four engineering reviews carried out between 1998 and 2002 before launching the construction of the magnets.”

The machine, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), aims to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang, when the universe is thought to have exploded into existence about 14 billion years ago. However, the November start-up may now have to be delayed until next spring.

Dr Lyn Evans, who leads the accelerator construction project at Cern, the European organisation for nuclear research, said the explosion had been potentially very dangerous.

“There was a hell of a bang, the tunnel housing the machine filled with helium and dust and we had to call in the fire brigade to evacuate the place,” he said. “The people working on the test were frightened to death but they were all in a safe place so no-one was hurt.” An investigation by Cern researchers found “fundamental” flaws that caused the explosion, close to the CMS detector, one of the LHC?s most important experiments.

The accelerator is designed to smash together protons, a kind of sub-atomic particle, at near light speed. The hope is that such collisions will generate exotic new particles ? especially the so-called Higgs boson which, theorists predict, could help explain key properties of matter, such as how it acquires mass and, hence, weight.

The LHC itself comprises two pipes, each containing a beam of protons travelling at near-light speed that are steered around the circular tunnel by powerful magnets. Such magnets are “superconducting” meaning they and the whole LHC are cooled to below -268C, using pipes filled with liquid helium.

The two proton beams travel in opposite directions but, at various points around the ring, their pipes merge, allowing the protons in each beam to collide.

However, since the thickness of each beam is less than that of a human hair, they have to be focused. This is the task of a second set of magnets, and it is these that were under test at the time of the explosion.

Coincidentally, Fermilab stands to gain most from delays at Cern. Its researchers also operate a rival but less powerful particle accelerator, the Tevatron.

Fermilab staff are pushing the Tevatron to ever-higher energies hoping that they might find the Higgs boson before the LHC switches on. An LHC researcher said: “Ironically, this delay could be all they need.”

Ouch.

Source

-Spenser

Edited by stifler6478

They shouldn't have been soo sure of themselves in the first place. You'll never learn anything unless you get things wrong sometimes. They're messing with stuff that they don't really know about. Something's bound to go wrong at some point.

If everything in life went smoothly things would get boring

If they do recreate the conditions that caused the Big Bang, what's stopping another Big Bang from occurring?

I think they meant the conditions of the Big Bang itself, not the conditions that caused it. It's impossible to re-create the Big Bang. Read this article, it's quite interesting. It's an old article written in February of 2000.

Physicists Recreate 'Big Bang' Conditions

So it was only off by a hair.... :rolleyes:

The beam itself is less than a human hair. Imagine the degree of precision required to align such a thin beam. :o

It's a good thing no one was killed or badly injured.

could you imagine the trouble someone is now in? Glad I am not in his shoes!

I was talking to my buddy about that. I would hate to be the higher-up in that position - they can't really fire any of the scientists/engineers that build these types of machines because there's not really a great wealth of people that can replace them if they were fired :rofl:

-Spenser

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
  • Posts

    • Euro-Office must default to ODF to be considered "genuinely European", LibreOffice argues by David Uzondu Euro-Office is a web-based collaborative office suite that positions itself as a "European sovereign alternative" to American tech companies, backed by a coalition of developers including Nextcloud, IONOS, Abilian, BTactic, OpenProject, and, more recently, Tuta. The project officially went live a couple of days ago, but not before drawing heavy fire from LibreOffice developers, who called the marketing claim that Euro-Office represents the "first open-source office suite developed in Europe" a deceptive historical inaccuracy because projects like OpenOffice and LibreOffice existed decades earlier. Now that the project has launched, LibreOffice is back with another complaint, arguing that Euro-Office cannot consider itself "genuinely European" while it pushes proprietary Microsoft defaults on users. Euro-Office had promised to improve the OpenDocument Format (ODF) back in April, but the current release still plagues users with several technical failures. For instance, the suite lacks an admin setting to enforce ODF, and mobile editors completely block ODF saves, forcing files into Microsoft's OOXML formats. Some configurations force files into read-only mode, while editing frequently corrupts document formatting or erases data. LibreOffice thinks that merely supporting a format as an afterthought does not make you a sovereign alternative, as file formats are the battleground where" digital sovereignty is won or lost." The road to the first stable release of Euro-Office has been quite bumpy due to an aggressive public fallout with OnlyOffice, from which the coalition originally forked the project. OnlyOffice struck back by accusing the coalition of violating copyright terms under its AGPLv3 branding requirements by stripping the original branding anyway and forking the code. Getting Euro-Office up and running is a bit wonky (at least for non-technical users), as there is no direct installer to grab off the web. The easiest way we learnt is by using Docker. First, pull the official Euro-Office image from the GitHub Container Registry: docker pull ghcr.io/euro-office/documentserver:latest Then, run the container with active ports and a secure JWT token, enabling the test environment: docker run -i -t -d -p 8080:80 --restart=always -e EXAMPLE_ENABLED=true -e JWT_SECRET=my_secure_jwt_secret ghcr.io/euro-office/documentserver:latest And finally, open a web browser and go to the following address: http://localhost:8080 If you are running this on a remote server, replace localhost with your server's IP address. You will see the Euro-Office test page, where you can create new text documents, spreadsheets, or presentations directly in the browser. Image via Euro-Office Nextcloud promises that proper standalone desktop versions and mobile apps will arrive in a future release.
    • It’s any of their products not just windows.
    • Google Gemini has been failing for users across the United States, Europe, and Asia since early Wednesday morning, June 10, 2026, and more than six hours into the incident Google has yet to declare a fix............. https://www.techtimes.com/articles/318152/20260610/google-gemini-outage-tops-six-hours-errors-1076-1099-worldwideflash-lite-still-answers.htm
    • Fun fact: There are more Warhammer 40k games than there are stars in the universe.
  • Recent Achievements

    • Week One Done
      FBSPL earned a badge
      Week One Done
    • One Year In
      Jim Dugan earned a badge
      One Year In
    • One Month Later
      Tommi118 earned a badge
      One Month Later
    • One Month Later
      sjbousquet earned a badge
      One Month Later
    • Week One Done
      sjbousquet earned a badge
      Week One Done
  • Popular Contributors

    1. 1
      +primortal
      486
    2. 2
      PsYcHoKiLLa
      197
    3. 3
      +Edouard
      155
    4. 4
      Steven P.
      83
    5. 5
      ATLien_0
      69
  • Tell a friend

    Love Neowin? Tell a friend!