• Question: What would happen if you put popcorn in a particle accelerator?

    Asked by desorgherm to Christina, Colin, Jess, Samaneh, Steve on 21 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Christina Pagel

      Christina Pagel answered on 21 Jun 2013:

      It would fall to the bottom of the tube and stay there! they move subatomic particles very quickly in the particle accelerators by using magnetic fields… this works on the subatomic particles because they are charged, but it won’t work on popcorn since it has no charge! So I think it would just sit there like, well, a lump of popcorn 🙂

    • Photo: Jess Bean

      Jess Bean answered on 21 Jun 2013:

      Well I don’t know about popcorn! But there was a particular incident a few years back where a piece of sandwich was dropped into the cooling units of the collider by a pigeon (or a very messy scientist!) This caused the cooling unit to fail and the entire thing had to be shut down to find out what was wrong!

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