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Large Hadron Collider broke down because of bad soldering on a single connection [Archive] - FreeConservatives

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DesertFox
10-07-2008, 12:34 AM
"It is very probable that there was a connection that wasn't good," said Lyn Evans, project leader of the 17-mile LHC, buried deep under Swiss soil at CERN, the European Nuclear Research Organization.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/01004/Large-Hadron-Coll-_1004993c.jpg

Wolfcounsel sits down to lunch at the Large Hadron Collider Greasy Spoon

The LHC, which aims to shed light on how the universe began by replicating conditions just after the Big Bang, has to operate at extremely cold temperatures.

It was switched on to great fanfare on Sep 10, but had to be turned back off nine days later because the cooling mechanism broke.

It takes weeks to rechill the machine to "superconducting" temperatures - allowing it to fire protons around a 17 mile loop of tunnels, causing them to crash into one another at close to light speed and break into even tinier particles

Mr Evans said he did not think a single fault in 10,000 connections was bad, but "it cost dearly".

More (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/3148417/Large-Hadron-Collider-broke-down-because-of-bad-soldering-on-a-single-connection.html)

DesertFox
10-07-2008, 12:45 AM
So the weakest link in the LHC chain was a solder joint. Serves them right for doping on the job.