Scientists Make Me Laugh

With all the major advances that science has been fortunate enough to have had this past century, one of the most interesting, at least in my opinion, are particle accelerators., to be more specific, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It works by accelerating two beams of protons to .999999991c, or 99.9999991% of the speed of light through a circle with a circumference of 17 miles. If you do the math the particles velocity turns out to be about 186282.395323458427 miles per second. The beams collide many times during this process and are picked up by six different detectors. Now that a basic background of the LHC has been established, I can move onto my main point. Just nine days after the first use of the LHC, there was mechanical difficulty, and a lethal helium leak occurred. In order to fix it, a month long warming up period must occur so that new parts can then be installed to replace the broken ones. Then another month will be taken to cool it down to the near absolute zero (the temperature at which matter no longer exists as it normally does) temperatures necessary for this machine to function as it should again. This happened back in September of 2008, and presently, the LCH is not scheduled to reopen until September of 2009. As much money as was put into making this, around the six billion dollar mark, not to mention that over ten thousand scientists are involved with it, there should have been more inspections, and safety precautions to prevent something like this from happening. I guess the universe likes to make jokes too, with scientists as one of its victims.
This article was my inspiration for this entry.

-Thomas Pearson