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The Large Hadron Collider in Geneva due to close for a year at the end of 2011

7:10pm Wednesday 10th March 2010 in


THE £4.4 billion machine that could help us understand the Big Bang is to be switched off for up to a year after the latest in a series of technical problems.

The Large Hadron Collider in Geneva will close at the end of 2011 for up to a year while design and safety issues are addressed.

It has already spent 14 months out of action following an accident in September 2008 and was reported to have narrowly avoided another serious problem when a bird dropped a piece of bread onto it in 2009.

Setbacks are an important part of what scientists do. Thomas Edison famously said: “I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

But scientific progress has been littered with some particularly galling examples of good plans gone awry: * In 1990, the vastly expensive Hubble space telescope sent back blurry images. The fault, which cost hundreds of millions of pounds to fix, was traced to a lens wrongly spaced by 1.3 milimetres.

* On Christmas Day 2003, the world waited in for news from Beagle 2, Britain’s Mars probe. Not a peep was ever heard. In 2004, the European Space Agency concluded it probably never made it to the Martian surface in tact.

* In 2004, Nasa’s Genesis probe returned with samples of solar wind for study – but its parachutes failed to deploy and it smashed into the Utah desert at 193mph.

It later turned out that, thanks to confusion over some of the designs, some components were installed upside down.

* In 1962, Mariner 1’s trip to Venus was wrecked after it veered off course. The most famous theory as to what went wrong blames it all on a computer program that was missing one hyphen.

Comments(11)

boardstiff says...
7:21pm Wed 10 Mar 10

Clearly Bournemouth Council are to blame for this one....

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a.g.o.g. says...
7:30pm Wed 10 Mar 10

Reason being likely that they are now beginning to come to believe there wasn`t one actually....

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rainbowkisses says...
7:46pm Wed 10 Mar 10

See Mr Echo is a glass half empty sort of person.

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The Seasider says...
8:02pm Wed 10 Mar 10

Love that headline. It made me "LOL".

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contric says...
8:09pm Wed 10 Mar 10

after we got married in 1974 my wife was offered a job at this place c.e.r.n. and having just bought are 3 bed detatched house in markham road for £8,200 with an£820 loan from my mother we thought why not and of we went to geneva in england i was working in ferndown for £28 a week but after 6weeks of living in geneva we had paid mum of we had never earnt so much money in such a relaxed atmosphere we were surprised how many people from this area worked there and now one of the personnel officers has retired to branksome area happy retirement mr milligan it was the best time of my working life and if you didnt want to do anything you didnt have to i used to go from cafe to cafe on site grabbing a beer and having fun i know it has changed now and my friend says they expect you to work as for the experiments we didnt care what they were doing as long as we could drink and have fun that place set us up for life but now older and wiser we would hope they get it sorted which they will thanks ken benney and geneva for are great memories

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McVICAR says...
8:38pm Wed 10 Mar 10

Is this thing connected to the imax and surf reef by any chance, it definitly has the hallmarks of Bournemouth council involvement

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grimreaper says...
9:01pm Wed 10 Mar 10

WOW
.
World News makes the ECHO

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dancingdog says...
9:11pm Wed 10 Mar 10

What's the betting it's the LHC that is causing the atrocious weather the world has started having just after it was switched on?

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grimreaper says...
9:49pm Wed 10 Mar 10

dancingdog wrote:
What's the betting it's the LHC that is causing the atrocious weather the world has started having just after it was switched on?
NO! it's the Surf Reef unbalancing the PLANET !!
.
But GORDON will save US !!!

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Duckorange says...
11:33am Thu 11 Mar 10

Unfortunately, this story is 100 per cent factually wrong.
The closure of the LHC in 2011 is a scheduled service outage after 18 months of use, and there are no "technical problems".
The LHC is not like a video recorder - it's the world's most complex machine that needs constant attention.
Perhaps this story is another example of good plans gone awry.

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ballstoit says...
1:19pm Thu 11 Mar 10

Give it a kick and crank that dial up to 11.

Dan Brown already wrote a book about it so the worst case scenario has already happened.

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