A welder begins works on the interconnections of magnets in the Large Hadron Collider(Photo courtesy The Telegraph)
Large Hadron Collider Broke Down Because Of Bad Soldering On A Single Connection -- Daily Telegraph
The £4.4 billion Large Hadron Collider was put out of action for months because one electrical connection out of 10,000 was badly soldered, the experiment's chief scientist said.
"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 Organisation.
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".
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My Comment: Only one? I worked as a welder a number of years ago. To be right 9,999 out of 10,000 .... Hmmmmm .... I am very skeptical.
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