A catastrophic fault

On 19 September 2008 a simple electrical short caused an enormous disaster at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva. What happened was the loss of capability to carry current due to warm between superconducting cables and connections. After electrical short, thousand of litres of liquid helium expanded into the ultra-clean beam line and ripped magnets from their strands.
The overall result was a delay in the biggest experiment scheduled at CERN in these last years, and more in general lack of experiments for more than one year. Several reasons could explain this failure. An investigation demonstrated that technicians didn’t properly solder the cables together. Lack of quality control and diagnostics and poor design contributed to the crash. Unfortunately, after a more deepen check, several connections resulted as defective and bad and LHC will not run at its full collision energy until around 2013.
The lesson from this story is that experimental planning, quality control and accuracy are three fundamental values to obtain good scientific results. Every scientist must attentively work on his project and believe that any technical fault is usually a human fault. Finally, it’s also important to learn from mistakes and, then, always make the best.