Not Good

Posted on March 30, 2007 by woit

This latest news from the LHC does not sound good. One hopes it won’t affect the LHC schedule.

Update: Also discussed at the Resonaances blog from CERN.

Update: Latest (4/3/07) news here.

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11 Responses to Not Good

  1. Peter Orland says:
    March 30, 2007 at 11:23 am

    Does anyone know if all nine of these assemblies can be modified? Or
    do they have to be rebuilt from scratch? How many will needed altogether? More than nine?

  2. tomj says:
    March 30, 2007 at 12:16 pm

    It sounds like the loads were never taken into consideration during design, and overlooked during multiple reviews, which seems weird because they were testing for the load, which shows up under several expected conditions during normal and abnormal operation.

  3. Yatima says:
    March 30, 2007 at 2:31 pm

    These things happen in engineering. (Independent) Verification and Validation _can_ miss things. Then costs go up (politically difficult) or the supplier will be asked to fix things at his expenses (leading to finger-pointing, more delays and lower quality). Grin and bear it.

    Just be happy that this project is not called “Galileo” (yes, I have a stack of GAL requirements on my desk)

  4. woit says:
    March 31, 2007 at 4:48 am

    Please, stop with the off-topic comments that have nothing to do with the magnets at CERN, I’ve had to delete a thread of these.

  5. anon says:
    March 31, 2007 at 11:09 am

    It’s just another delay tactic of the string theorists.

  6. Pingback: Three years of delay for LHC startup! « A Quantum Diaries Survivor

  7. Haelfix says:
    April 1, 2007 at 4:17 am

    The vibe from experimentalists in my department who work at CERN range the entire gamut of the map. So I don’t really have any good inside information about it. One seems to think its not a big deal, whereas some others are furious about it and already booking plane tickets. Its quite hush hush though, as I can’t coax much information out of them.

    My best guess from what I felt is some delays, but perhaps not as bad as some thought.

  8. Aymar resigns>>Resonaances says:
    April 1, 2007 at 10:17 am

    […] the start of the LHC will be delayed by several years. Following these reports, the CERN Council had a special meeting today, during which Director General Robert Aymar resigned from his post. I assume full responsibility for what has happened, he said […]

  9. Chuckles says:
    April 1, 2007 at 1:46 pm

    I think its about time to start a String Theory Costs ticker, just like all those Iraq War Costs tickers on so many websites. Until people are convinced that we are actually spending good money day after day on what is quickly becoming cultic activity within the realms of natural science, the kind of public reevaluation we need will not be forthcoming.

  10. Ari Heikkinen says:
    April 4, 2007 at 12:56 pm

    “These things happen in engineering.”

    Actually no.

    When you design a pressure vessel (as I understand it was) you have to be right, you can’t just wait for it to explode and fix it later.

  11. Bob says:
    April 5, 2007 at 11:29 am

    Well, of course oversights happen while developing any major project. What is very troubling here — and every project manager’s nightmare — is that the “longitudinal forces” that caused the failure were, according to Fermilab, never accounted for in the specs and were not identified as potential problem by the external oversight reviews.

    The latest update from Fermilab is at (http://www.fnal.gov/pub/today/20070403_page01.html).

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