It’s just not as exciting the second time

I suppose such a provocative headline could apply to any number of things – skydiving, swearing in front of Grandma, sneaking into the movies, crossdressing in public – but I’m not speaking of any these.  Instead, I’m referring to the switching on of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider).

Again.

After a great deal of hubbub and furor and all sorts of doomsday predictions about the creation of black holes that would destroy the planet, the LHC was switched on and then, due to malfunction, turned off again.  A bit of an armchair scientist, I was excited when this massive machine was turned on and disappointed when it was shut off, but I wasn’t interested enough to learn why it had been turned off.  “Malfunction,” was good enough for me. 

The thing is, it sounds like it might have been a lot cooler than a simple mechanical malfunction.

The scientists at CERN don’t like to talk about an explosion – operations group manager Steve Myers refers to “strong forces” being brought to bear – but in all more that 37 of the giant dipole and quadrupole magnets, each weighing several tonnes and connected together in sequence like the carriages of a train, were shunted out of position. It must have been quite a bang.

Yeah, I’d say that’s a little more than a simple malfunction.  But for the size of the “explosion” that knocked these many tonnes of magnets askew, it seems it was a fairly minor fault.

But just nine days later that [poorly soldered] join – one of 24,000 – shorted out, triggering a dramatic rise in temperature and a sudden release of liquid helium.

I would think that a machine that is 17 miles in circumference and requires 96 tonnes of liquid helium to keep it at its required operating temperature of -271 C is bound to have a few technical snags.  Hopefully, now that it is up and running, there will be no more mishaps. 

Yet the whole plan makes me nervous.  You see, the purpose of the LHC is to smash protons together.  And everyone who has ever seen Ghostbusters knows that crossing the proton streams is a very bad idea.