Did You Know? #41

Fred's Note: I just got my first copy of Popular Science magazine. At the risk of stating the obvious, I will occasionally pass along an item or two in future blog posts starting with this "special" Did You Know.


What would happen if you got zapped by the Large Hadron Collider?

Interestingly, the answer starts out with a detailed explanation of how this could never happen due to the fail safe mechanisms built into the Large Hadron Collider. 

Each of the collider's two proton beams comprises 320 trillion particles, so the total energy delivered is a blazing 362 megajoules, enough to melt about half a ton of copper. Science lesson #1: A joule can also be defined as the work required to produce one watt of power for one second. A megajoule is equal to one million joules. 1 kilowatt-hour is 1000 watts times 3600 seconds, or 3.6 megajoules. Assuming you could manage to squeeze your face inside the collider, what would happen next is unclear. I think we can all agree that whatever happens next is likely to be rather unpleasant. Then again, why would you put your noodle in front of a particle collider if you weren't looking for an unpleasant outcome? Physical damage would depend upon how many protons collided with nuclei in your flesh and how many zipped through undisturbed, like plankton through a net. The beam would almost certainly burn a hole through your face, but the shape of the hole would be hard to determine. Yeah, the shape of the hole is what I would be focusing on, rather than the fact that part of my face has just been vaporized. When protons smack into a target, they fling off secondary particles in different directions, which can themselves set off another round of collisions. as a result, proton beams create a hole that spreads out laterally the deeper it goes, like a large cone. Science lesson #2: Science is not only educational, but fun too (and maybe just a little bit creepy).