Sticking Your Hand In The Large Hadron Collider

Well then that settles it, if I ever find myself near a LHC, I will never, ever stick my hand in it.
 
Yeah putting your hand infront of particles traveling up towards the speed of light sounds like a good ide... :rolleyes:
 
Stormtrooper to Death Star engineer:
What would happen if I put my hand in the beam as we fire at Alderaan?

Yeah, kinda like that?
 
Hmm, energy of an aircraft carrier in motion focused into a beam less than 1mm wide. Yeah, that's not gonna end well.
 
someone call Yerli and tell them to incorporate a hadron Collider gun into crysis 3.
 
You would die from the Radiation poisoning and wouldn't give a shit about the whole you have through your hand.
 
I'm pretty sure I saw this question answered a LONG time ago, back when it was first starting to get operational.
 
Wolfkin said:
Yeah putting your hand infront of particles traveling up towards the speed of light sounds like a good ide... :rolleyes:
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It's not about the speed, it is about a particle concentration. If you want to see particles traveling at the speed of light (or very close to it), just look outside the window through the day. But the photons which are coming from the sun are not concentrated, and that means they don't hurt you :).
 
I was hoping the answer would have been Doctor Manhattan like superpowers :(
 
MavericK96 said:
Well...you never know until you try! :D
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It's all theory. Perhaps it's the one thing in the universe that defies logic and physics and you really will get super powers! I'm gonna go stand in line....
 
faugusztin said:
It's not about the speed, it is about a particle concentration. If you want to see particles traveling at the speed of light (or very close to it), just look outside the window through the day. But the photons which are coming from the sun are not concentrated, and that means they don't hurt you :).
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Photons are mass-less.
 
These articles are great for Fridays. Just spent a good 30 minutes talking about it with a co-worker.
 
Intel_Hydralisk said:
Photons are mass-less.
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I thought someone had said that light was both a particle (having mass, although a very tiny amount) and a wave... I'm not anything close to a physicist, just something I remember hearing...
 
Intel_Hydralisk said:
Photons are mass-less.
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Sort of. Photons simply have no rest mass since they can't exist at rest, which is why they are considered mass-less. ;) See convertibility of mass/energy in special/general relativity.

Absorbing/emitting a high energy photon changes the energy or mass of a system by E=mc^2 (or m=E/c^2). See Maxwell's momentum equation for em waves. As an exercise you can derive Einstein's special relativity equation from it. ;)
 
Intel_Hydralisk said:
Photons are mass-less.
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Fine... there are billions upon billions (trillions?!) of neutrinos flying through you right now at .99999c or so... Ain't doing a damn thing to you.

Ur_Mom said:
I thought someone had said that light was both a particle (having mass, although a very tiny amount) and a wave... I'm not anything close to a physicist, just something I remember hearing...
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I'm sure someone did say that, but they're wrong, light has no mass, it has an energy which behaves like an equivalent of mass but not mass in the conventional sense.
 
The LHC circulates protons, which do have mass. And moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light, they would pack a serious punch!
 
And one of the not good results from "Wanna see something cool? Here! Hold my beer!"
 
GaryJohnson said:
If my math is correct, the LHC beam is over 9000 times more powerful than the one Anatoli was hit with.

(7 TeV * 10^34cm^2*s^2) vs (76 GeV * 10^32cm^2*s^2)
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Obligatory response:

1471637_med.png
 
SamE said:
The LHC circulates protons, which do have mass. And moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light, they would pack a serious punch!
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And also lead ions. BIG ATOMS SMASH!
 
What people here bantering about light and mass seem to be missing is that mass and energy are the same thing, just in different forms. Energy can be added to mass (kinetic), and mass can be converted into energy (matter + antimatter = pure EM energy). The energy from a single photon of light is next to nothing compared to the energy of a proton sped up to near light speed. That's why you can absorb a LOT of EM energy into your body and not be damaged, while absorbing particles traveling at that speed is bad. Particle beams of any kind are extremely dangerous. A typical EBM drill can cut a 120 micron hole through one inch of stainless steel in less than a second, and that's only at about 140,000 volts and 100 micro amps. That's about 14 kilowatts of power. The LHC uses 120 megawatts of power - roughly 8600 times more power than a standard EBM drill. If you walked into the beam from the LHC it would cut you in half and the radiation exposure would cause immediate systemic cellular disruption. You would be dead before you could even realize that you had an accident.
 
faugusztin said:
What MavericK96 said - tell that to the industry (Class IV/4) or military laser pointed at your hand. Those mass-less photons would hurt a lot.
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I suppose that being massless, the collateral damage is going to be minimal. If it was a bullet from an anti-material rifle, the amount of energy carried by its mass gets transfered to the hand, and it'll likely explode even tho the bullet itself is only a couple of centimeters wide.

If the bullet had no mass (ex: the photons or lasers), even tho it's got the power of an aircraft carrier behind it, the whole thing will just go through the hand and leave the rest intact.

I think the guy in the hardhat meant it that way as he did say they have put metal plates in front of the beam and it punched holes through it. I'd like to see what those plates looked like afterwards if we were to settle this.

Of course, i'm assuming we're talking about the possible damage of a massless photon, i don't know what kind of radiation (electrical or otherwise) accompanies it as it travels down the line.
 
I think someone should climb inside the tunnel, instant Dr. Manhattan.
 
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