The Large Hadron Collider in Geneva due to close for a year at the end of 2011 (From Bournemouth Echo)

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

7:10pm Wednesday 10th March 2010

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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.

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