As you undoubtedly already know, the Large Hadron Collider suffered a setback this week:
The start-up of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN could be delayed after three of the magnets used to focus and manipulate the accelerator’s proton beams failed preliminary tests at CERN earlier this week. The magnets were built at Fermilab in the US, which announced the failure on its Web site. Although CERN has not yet issued a formal statement on the set-back, it looks increasingly unlikely that the LHC will come on-line this year as planned.
(See also the official Fermilab release on the failure.)
Liquor sales near major universities are expected to spike upwards, as high-energy physicists spiral into depression…
Kidding aside, I have a good deal of sympathy for the predicament of the people involved in the field. A couple of years ago, I had a turbopump start making a death rattle the day before we were leaving for a family vacation, and I was miserable company for the entire trip. When major equipment goes down, it’s hard not to see your whole career crumbling.
Of course, my vacuum pump breaking really only affects me and my students. It’s difficult to imagine how to scale this up to something like the LHC, which carries pretty much all of the hopes of an entire field of physics. Any major delay in the construction and start-up schedule for the LHC affects hundreds if not thousands of people worldwide. I’m amazed that the people building it manage to function at all under the weight of those expectations.
It’s not clear how big this problem really is, and details will no doubt trickle out over the next week or two. Here’s hoping the damage isn’t too bad, and they manage to get things back on track as quickly as possible.