Math challenged
Posted by Richard on April 9, 2007
The Large Hadron Collider is a $4 billion proton accelerator project at the Cern complex in Switzerland. It’s intended to mimic the conditions of the Big Bang. Recently, scientists there created a big bang all right, thanks to some embarrassing mistakes in simple math:
The mistakes led to an explosion deep in the tunnel at the Cern particle accelerator complex near Geneva in Switzerland. It lifted a 20-ton magnet off its mountings, filling a tunnel with helium gas and forcing an evacuation.
It means that 24 magnets located all around the 17-mile circular accelerator must now be stripped down and repaired or upgraded. The failure is a huge embarrassment for Fermilab, the American national physics laboratory that built the magnets and the anchor system that secured them to the machine.
It appears Fermilab made elementary mistakes in the design of the magnets and their anchors that made them insecure once the system was operational.
That’s what they get for letting Americans make critical mathematical calculations. Don’t they realize that, when it comes to math, Americans are typically cocky and dumb? 😉
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