• Question: Has anything ever gone wrong in any experiments?

    Asked by to Becky, Clara, Daniel, Simon, Thomas on 12 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Simon Albright

      Simon Albright answered on 12 Mar 2014:

      I wish I could say no, but that would be a massive lie!

      Even considering that all of my work is computer based it’s fair to assume that if it can go wrong it will have done at some point, probably several points. Everything from missing a “;” at the end of a line of code to making a mistake in a batch of simulations which wastes days of computer time.

      But mistakes are how we learn, though I’m not sure why, if we learn from our mistakes, I’m not a super genius yet…

    • Photo: Daniel Roach

      Daniel Roach answered on 12 Mar 2014:

      All the time!

      As part of my experimental work, I prepare samples – make materials – for experiments. Sometimes, you end up with something strange in the data because you have something like water vapour trapped in your sample, or the instrument does something unexpected or… well, you can imagine how confusin things can get, especially when you don’t understand what you’re seeing!

    • Photo: Becky Martin

      Becky Martin answered on 12 Mar 2014:

      It’s when things go wrong, that my research becomes especially entertaining.I spend a lot of my time fixing code, and faffing about with my models. Here’s a tale of model (mis)behaviour for you!

      When I put my first population model together for a simulated evacuation, I’d left out an important line of code that told my population where not to go – I was modelling a coastal town evacuation, and all my people decided to take a dip in the English Channel as a consequence. Obviously, this happened the first time I showed my model to my boss, too!

      Whilst it was an interesting evacuation strategy, I don’t think it was a very sensible one. I’ve since figured out how to make my modelled populations now go to evacuation centres. 😉

    • Photo: Clara Nellist

      Clara Nellist answered on 12 Mar 2014:

      Yes. When the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) first turned on in 2008 it had a very small problem with one of the magnets that bends the beam around the 27km tunnel underground. They need to be cooled down to *really* cold temperatures with liquid helium (which actually makes them colder than in outer space!) so that they become super conductive. This just means they don’t have any resistance and the electricity can go through them really easily. But there was an electrical fault and everything heated up, causing the liquid helium to leak out. This warmed up and became gas, which caused 50 magnets nearby to break and everything had to be turned off. All the plans that had been put into place to happen in the event of something breaking worked and sot this meant that it could be repaired.

      For most of 2009, CERN checked the damage, made repairs to that area of the machine and checked that no where else had the same problem. We then started the LHC up again, but instead of using it at full energy, it was decided that we would start with a lower energy and work our way up to make sure everything was fine on the way. At the moment, we’re just over half way there.

      This was a pretty big event, but people worked very hard and we learnt a lot from it and it didn’t delay us too much.

      For my everyday research, things do go wrong sometimes. For example I might take a new pixel detector to test it in a beam of particles at CERN and it might not work straight away. But that’s a normal part of my job because everything we do is brand new and often things won’t work, so we have to fix them. We get it working in the end though, or we learn something about why it didn’t work. Both are useful (but one is more frustrating!)

    • Photo: Thomas Elias Cocolios

      Thomas Elias Cocolios answered on 12 Mar 2014:

      In a 2012 experiment, upon hearing that there might be a power failure in the lab, we had to perform an emergency shut down of our machine. We had been sleeping less than 2 hours per day for a week, so we were all a bit tired and, in the craze of the moment, the head of the experiment (and a good friend of mine) pulled the wrong plug…

      Instead of closing the protection valves to the system, he stopped the vacuum pump and air entered immediately in the experiment vessel (otherwise kept empty). It was filled with potassium, and heated to ~150 degrees. The humidity in the air and the potassium reacted with each other and we heard a big POOF! inside the chamber. Needless to say that it was the end of the experiment that year!

      Although it was not as big an explosion as what @claranellist has described, it happened less than 1m away from me and shook me for sure! We are now back in business and ready to start experimenting again starting this summer!

Comments