Prince

I woke up from a nap today and immediately asked my wife the following question: "If you put a human being in a particle accelerator and turn it on, what happens to him?"

She replied with "What the fuck is wrong with you?"

I thought maybe the TFP would have a more scientific answer.

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Daniel_

Essentially it depends on what you have running round the particle accelerator.

Generally you'd be hitting them with a vast ammount of energy, a moderate ammount of high speed (nearly light speed) matter, and probably a large whallop of ionising radiation (unless you generated a neutron beam).

Pretty much, you'd fry them, punch a hole through them, cook them, and give them radiation poisoning at the same time.

That's assuming that they didn't try to move in the hyper-strong magnetic field - which would cause magnetic eddies in the fluids of the body, and cause them to boil.

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Overhead, the Albatross hangs motionless upon the air,
And deep beneath the rolling waves,
In labyrinths of Coral Caves,
The Echo of a distant time
Comes willowing across the sand;
And everthing is Green and Submarine
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Pip

Don't forget the vacuum. You'll explode and/or suffocate.

I wonder about the magnetic field though. The (smallish) particle accelerator I visited once had a magnetic field of 3 - 4 Tesla, and I've been in a 1.5 Tesla field for almost half an hour once and didn't notice anything weird (except the cold and noise from the field generators).

filtherton

It would probably give you super powers.

Ch'i

Probably..

shakran

You won't explode. the body does not blow up in a vacuum. In fact, exposure to vacuum for 30 seconds or so is considered surviveable by NASA as long as you don't try to hold your breath (would damage the lungs)

Zeraph

I wonder what it would feel like to be in a vacuum...

The super hero comment made me LOL

micah67

It sucks.
(Sorry: couldn't resist.)

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flat5

You're sick.

Demeter

I'm thinking that's how they make twinkies.

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vermin

I would think that if the person is made of particles, they would accellerate (hence the name of the device).

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Sharon

Turn the particle accelerator on, or the human being?

mo42

A human being would die instantly as there are not particle accelerators large enough for an intact human body to fit inside.

Even if you could, there wouldn't be enough power to accelerate something as large as a 150 pound human body, which essentially has a neutral charge and would thus be fairly unresponsive to magnets.

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OzOz

What I have to wonder out loud is: Exactly what is the inspiration for the OP's original question?

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BadNick

Prince,
since I'm pretty sure a human won't fit into any existing particle accelerator, I wonder if your question can be reworded to one of these? Or am I twisting your question off target by asking these?

1) what happens as you accelerate a human to near the speed of light? (it could be a long, slow acceleration so forces don't have destructive effects, and forget about how long it takes and how long a human actually lives)

2) what happens if a human is bombarded with a stream of particles travelling at or near the speed of light if those particles are either electrons, protons, neutrons, neutrinos, etc? ...choose the particle you like most.

Or were you just trying to make your wife feel good?

Prince

Actually, those are the questions I meant to ask.

What brought this up was an X-Files episode, in which they had, if memory serves me, a particle accelerator large enough for a person to fit into. Maybe it wasn't a particle accelerator, but that's how I remember it. Anyway, we all know that the science in the X-Files is sound, but I thought I'd ask what the real world makes of it.

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Who is John Galt?

OzOz

As far as I understand it:

1) Nothing much. Nothing at all, in fact. That's the thing about relativity. The person being accelerated wouldn't feel any different - they'd only feel the acceleration. To anyone standing around outside the accelerator, you'd see the usual relativistic effects - length contraction, the acceleratee aging more slowly, that sort of thing. But otherwise, nothing - unless, of course, a brick wall got in the way. Also, when they're moving that fast - don't blink or you'll miss 'em.

2) Neutrinos would be fine - they ignore pretty much everything. You'd need a REALLY intense neutrino source nearby for much to happen - like a supernova in your solar system. During the average person's lifetime, the odds are that just ONE neutrino interaction will happen in a given person's body. That's over eighty-odd years, and despite being constantly bombarded by a flood of billions of neutrinos every second from the Sun (plus sundries), twenty-four hours a day (they pass straight through the Earth).

The other stuff - not fun. OzOz is not volunteering to be placed in a beam of electrons, protons or neutrons.

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Maybe you should put some shorts on or something, if you wanna keep fighting evil today.

Astrocloud

1) Well, they might have to reset their watch after their ride.

DaveOrion

My God, I may have finally found a home..........my lesser half asks "WTF is wrong with you" on a regular basis..........I'll tell her that when you look at the night sky, you're looking into the past.....that the light from those stars may have taken hundreds or thousands of years to get here, so if a star a thousand light years away goes nova we wouldnt see it for a thousand years, and when we do see it, it already happened a thousand years ago......and of course she says"WTF is wrong with you.........."

Hain

I am not thinking that the magnetic field is strong enough to boil you. A powerful modern electromagnetic has the ability to produce 16 tesla, and all it had the ability to levitate a frog from the minuscule diamagnetic fields in that frog. The frog didn't even care. It was just in the field trying to jump away not understanding that it can't.

Would I want to be in an accelerator? No. I am stocky enough and don't need the kinetic energy of particles being transformed into more mass from collisions.

Charlatan

There are actually different types of particle accelerators... what kind are you talking about?

I have a friend who is a particle physicist. He runs projects at Fermilab, CERN and in the Nutrino thing in Japan. He once told me this story about a Russian scientist who stuck his head into a particle beam:

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filtherton

Botox can eat a dick! A billion dollars goes to whomever can figure out how to put miniature particle accelerators in beauty salons.

Nimetic

"And does not age"

I love it.. that ending, what a paragraph. He doesn't have a painting of the left side of his face do you think - that ages instead.

MSD

Since you're in a vacuum, even if you exhale your lungs will fill with blood because your circulatory system will be under pressure and your lungs would not. You would drown in your own blood within a few minutes.
Episode "Soft Light," one of the last few from season 2.