It was a only a matter of time before it happened. But then, it's always a matter of time. No one even noticed that anything out of the ordinary had happened. The scale of the accident was far too small to be even a blip on anyone's monitor. Normal operations continued uninterrupted. But something fantastic has occurred. No logical explanation exists. The best understanding we can hope for is an accounting of the events. On the morning of December 8th, 1993, this is what occurred.

In a relatively small building tucked into the base of a California mountain ridge, preparations to initiate the particle accelerator were underway. The Los Picos Laboratory project team had been up all night, as usual. To the team members, all the romance had faded several iterations earlier. Their boredom was not a serious threat to the exercise since the Los Picos facility was coordinated through an intricate web of computers. The network included more than 100 directly participating CPUs and dozens more used by the humans to observe and record each exercise. Much of the preparation for each accelerator test was the setup and preparation of the computer control systems. Each run required slight variations to each system and they all had to be synchronized in order to produce the desired particle physics effect.

The network that connects the systems provides two important functions. It allows the setup activity to be conducted from a single physical point and it acts as the communications medium between actuators and monitors during each accelerator run. Furthermore, the monitors use the network's second level segments to ship huge amounts of information to the database machine for subsequent analyses.

This process control design is not that much different than those used in an ordinary automated manufacturing environment. That is, except for one major design factor shared by the Los Picos Laboratory with other accelerator facilities -- electro-magnetic field shielding.

The acceleration of sub-atomic particles to extremely high speeds depends upon the use of high powered magnetic fields. The fields are used to guide and propel the particles in circular or linear patterns. These fields and their high frequency fluctuations are simply not compatible with the standard design characteristics of network electronics and wire media. In order to counter these effects, extreme shielding must be incorporated into the network design and that shielding must be absolute.


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