Tuesday, April 03, 2007

Did Fermilab sabotage CERN?

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN suffered a serious setback on March 27th, when the structure supporting some of the superconducting magnets collapsed. The assembly was made by Fermilab, CERN's main rival for the discovery of elementary particles. This seems rather like Airbus getting Boeing to manufacture the wings for the new Airbus A380, but perhaps CERN had no other option. It might also have been an assembly problem, a bit like flat-pack furniture.

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