Many people have argued that the Hadron Collider - a 17 mile long machine built to be a massive particle collider - might generate a world ending black hole. This has been brushed off as absurd by most of the scientific community. However, my faith that "nothing bad" might happen is shaken by a series of events.
Admittedly, this is likely the most complex machine ever built by human beings.
First, the collider was shut down due to a transformer problem. However, that news was suppressed for almost a week.
While happening after the above, we first found out that the computers at the facility were hacked. Further, this was not outside attack. The hackers were allowed access to the site by posing as a security team. After gaining access to the facility, they were able to hack into the control software of the collider. Since a machine this complex also requires complex programming, this could have been (or could be) a significant event.
Now we find there are two other little problems. First, from the BBC, we learn that there is a magnet problem which may shut down operations for months. And we learn from al Jazeera, that a helium leak has cropped up.
The collider is credited with being the most complex machine ever built, and the energy generated to be as powerful as the sun, which may be why it was built almost 300 yards underground. As CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) notes:
Starting up a major new particle accelerator takes much more than flipping a switch. Thousands of individual elements have to work in harmony, timings have to be synchronized to under a billionth of a second, and beams finer than a human hair have to be brought into head-on collision.
Well, it seems like things are less than "harmonious" with the project.
On the brighter side, it seems like they are shutting down to address issues - even if they are being less than forthcoming about the problems that are arising.
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