- Joined
- 3 May 2004
- Posts
- 17,718
- Location
- Kapitalist Republik of Surrey
I was sitting in one of the meeting rooms at work with a couple of colleagues the other week, drinking coffee and generally chatting rubbish as you do. One of my colleagues was trying to screw together a prototype for the world's first supercapacitor run with octopus shaped carbon nanotubes while me and the other chap were sat there with our feet up on the table. The managing director walked past with a load of important looking people and raised an eyebrow, but I don't think he really knew what was going on.
We were talking about CERN and then how cool it might be to make our own particle accelerator in the office, just a small one, but it would be powerful enough to zap stuff and maybe put on a bit of a mad light show and maybe at least blow up spectacularly if it went wrong. So I had a look online about particle accelerators and forgot that most nights I'm sat in front of a fairly large one, in the form of my knackered old telly I found dumped in my front garden.
So there's the source of my particles. It's a cathode ray tube, so it's electrons we're talking about here, and a control grid to play with the direction. Crank up the power ridiculously high and there's a nice strong source of electromagnetic particles to play with.
I really wanted a donut shaped particle accelerator but it was looking increasingly complicated to set up. The particles have to be directed round the tube under control with magnets and I wasn't convinced I was clever enough to do this with a load of magnets nicked out the speakers in the hi-fi, then change the control it so I could fire them out a tube on the side into something. I decided to go for a straight tube, or linear particle accelerator, which just needs a high voltage grid for the accelerating and all your particles just get accelerated out the end.
I need to point out here that I'm no particle physicist and I have no idea what I'm doing. This was starting to look more and more like a ray gun in my mind. I decided to seek professional help.
The bad news is I've been warned NOT to try and build this. I've been told at the very least I'll probably end up with nasty radiation burns and at most I'll die slowly and painfully. I keep getting this mental picture of firing the thing up only to find it's too dangerous to stand near, not being able to turn it off, and my office being isolated as a radiation hazard.
Ah well
We were talking about CERN and then how cool it might be to make our own particle accelerator in the office, just a small one, but it would be powerful enough to zap stuff and maybe put on a bit of a mad light show and maybe at least blow up spectacularly if it went wrong. So I had a look online about particle accelerators and forgot that most nights I'm sat in front of a fairly large one, in the form of my knackered old telly I found dumped in my front garden.
So there's the source of my particles. It's a cathode ray tube, so it's electrons we're talking about here, and a control grid to play with the direction. Crank up the power ridiculously high and there's a nice strong source of electromagnetic particles to play with.
I really wanted a donut shaped particle accelerator but it was looking increasingly complicated to set up. The particles have to be directed round the tube under control with magnets and I wasn't convinced I was clever enough to do this with a load of magnets nicked out the speakers in the hi-fi, then change the control it so I could fire them out a tube on the side into something. I decided to go for a straight tube, or linear particle accelerator, which just needs a high voltage grid for the accelerating and all your particles just get accelerated out the end.
I need to point out here that I'm no particle physicist and I have no idea what I'm doing. This was starting to look more and more like a ray gun in my mind. I decided to seek professional help.
The bad news is I've been warned NOT to try and build this. I've been told at the very least I'll probably end up with nasty radiation burns and at most I'll die slowly and painfully. I keep getting this mental picture of firing the thing up only to find it's too dangerous to stand near, not being able to turn it off, and my office being isolated as a radiation hazard.
Ah well
Where would the USSR Nuclear Reactor program be if they said this is too dangerous to build lets give up, Oh wait............... 
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