Question: are you able to take risks in science like if you want to find a chemical reaction would you risk iyt blowing up? BOOM evil scientist >:>>

Kristian Harder answered on 14 Nov 2013:

Science experiments can be risky, true. Mad scientists, evil scientists and stupid scientists (all of which exist, I hear, but are fortunately very rare) might just do it anyway. 🙂 For the rest of us the secret is *managing* risk. If you think it might blow up, then do it in an explosion proof lab with robotic arms or whatever. In our case, the thing most likely to blow up is a liquid helium pipe or tank, if that liquid helium isn’t cooled properly and evaporates. Something like that actually happened a few days after the LHC was first switched on. Due to someone not soldering the cables together properly, the superconducting cables lost their superconductivity, heated up very quickly, which evaporated a lot of the liquid Helium used to cool them. Now, speaking of managing risk, we did of course have overpressure valves to let the machine vent off Helium gas if something like this happened, but this soldering problem was so bad and so unexpected that the safety valves couldn’t cope with it, and a section of the LHC literally exploded. Fortunately nobody was injured – mostly, because there is a second level of managing risk, and that is to net let anyone stay anywhere near the LHC when it is running. That’s another great example of how we manage risk. You only get into the LHC tunnel by going through a double door system with an iris scanner (so only people get in who are known to have the proper training), and every person has to carry their own key to get in, and as long as not all keys have been brought back out, it is actually impossible to switch on the LHC. This way nobody can be forgotten inside the tunnel. This is called an interlock system.
So, many examples how you can reduce or eliminate risk, making something that might otherwise be dangerous a very safe thing to do. 🙂