Regarding to a comment in recent post about LHC I made a little research on whether the LHC is a real danger to human being or just a science project aimed to help us understand how the Universe was made.
The comment was posted by Jason:
[…]these “geniuses” already made a gigantic miscalculation and destroyed, nay, shattered one of their magnets due to a design flaw that was undetected by everyone since the original drafts were made. This is not something to take lightly. Anytime there is human involvement there is a large chance for human error. We are fucked. Don’t forget about Murphy’s law.
Although taking into consideration different factors around any project scientists can measure and estimate the error percent, but there is always a human factor that leads to an error and then… No one can estimate the consequences.
The same happened to the LHC when it was in a building stage (April 2007):
[…] 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.
Dr Lyn Evans, who leads the accelerator construction project at CERN, the European organization for nuclear research, said the explosion had been potentially very dangerous.
“There was a hell of a bang, the tunnel housing the machine filled with helium and dust and we had to call in the fire brigade to evacuate the place,” he said. “The people working on the test were frightened to death but they were all in a safe place so no-one was hurt.” An investigation by CERN researchers found “fundamental” flaws that caused the explosion, close to the CMS detector, one of the LHC’s most important experiments. Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1626728.ece
At some point Jason is right - even taking into account huge experience of engineers and scientists there is always place for disturbance, boredom, depression, frustration, nervousness, tension - conditions where any human being can make a mistake, even irretrievable one. But who doesn’t make mistakes? Only those who do nothing and solution for not making a mistake is simple - just sit in a corner and do nothing.
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