Life and Physics

I was driving into Argonne with a colleague yesterday morning and he was telling me about the experiment (E687) that he worked on when he was a graduate student. It caught fire and burnt down. The reason for the fire was found to originate from a very high voltage power supply with no fuse. This alone would not have caused the fire. The wires in those days were flammable, and they were hanging down a bit where they were fed into the detector so they were separated with (highly flammable) polystyrene wedges.

Continue at The Guardian.