Guy builds particle accelerator in kitchen | Hacker News Reader

Guy builds particle accelerator in kitchen

pstevensonkeating.co.uk

60 pointsjgamman24 comments

You know LCDs have taken over when people don't know the difference between a particle accelerator and a CRT :-).

Basically the guy uses a 45Kv voltage source to 'accelerate' electrons past a grid which then hit a phosphor and emit light (poorly). If he had used mercury vapor he could have created ultraviolet light and then used a phosphor to convert that to visible light and thus make his very own fluorescent bulb.

Now this stuff used to come out every month in Scientific American's Amateur Science column, these days they are afraid to publish such information for fear of being sued. Sad really.

I spent many happy hours reading _The Amateur Scientist_ in my Dad's pile of SciAms. I was never brave enough (or had enough pocket money) to build much, especially the high voltage gizmos that required, as a rule, a "Model T spark transformer." That was just terrifying.

I built a Hilsch vortex tube out of plexiglass, some washers and some extra pipe. Mostly it just whistled obnoxiously; I needed a better source of compressed air than my bicycle pump and a small reservoir could provide.

I also built a spectrometer, with a transmission grating I got from my science teacher. That was nifty.

I miss this stuff. We are a poorer nation for losing it. "Make" magazine might fill in for the gizmo aspect of things, but not so much the science.

Pardon me, I have to chase the kids off my lawn. :-)

A neat trick these days is to make spectrometer with a diffraction grating made by removing the backing foil of a CD-R so only the transparent plastic remains (I did it a few years ago so it may have been one of the other CD types. Basically if it looks rainbowy afterwords you should be good to go ;)).

Well, you can use the CD with the aluminium as a reflection grating

Good point. I used it as a diffraction grating in mine since that allowed me to construct the rest of it like I remembered them from highschool. So long as you can spit the light though there are a lot of options.

Wait, "The Amateur Scientist"? When did that run? I was very inspired by the mathematical recreations column of SciAms as a kid. Who knows what I would have become had I also found an Amateur Scientist column :-/ Do they have any collections of that by chance? There was one for the mathematical recreations (or computational recreations, not sure anymore).

Ah, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amateur_Scientist - it run from 1928 till 2001, there is a book from 1960 and CD-ROMs with the articled from 1928 to 1999 (amazon.de shows only one used copy for 2200€...). 1999-2001 might be available online.

The US version of Amazon has the CD for $149. I got a free copy when I resubscribed at some point.

Well, a CRT is a particle accelerator. It just isn't a very good one. I'd be more impressed if he built a cyclotron.

Your summary is just brilliantly spot on and I wished I could mod you up more than the article.

Sued by who? Holders of CRT patents?

Sued by people who shock the everloving crap out of themselves by messing around with this kind of stuff.

Yes, today people demand a safety and health warning in a plastic knife

Maybe that's why SciAm's Amateur Scientist was so high level. You have to be "up there" to begin to understand what to do.

(Yes you need a vacuum pump, a CO2 tank and the ability to melt glass for that nifty green laser of yours)

I would like to appreciate this more, but the two videos are very lacking. The first one is nothing but loud, overly obnoxious weird music. The second, which seems to detail the crafting and construction of the device, has no sound. A simple voiceover talking about exactly what is being done would have made this much better, and at least slightly interesting.

It's cute, but a lot more is doable at that level. Make a Van de Graaff generator, big enough to spew at least half a million volts, or perhaps a tandem generator for a full megavolt goodness. Now connect that puppy to a vacuum chamber. That's a lot more serious stuff than a measly 45 kV thing.

Also, people have built cyclotrons at home. Just sayin'.

Meh, if you want to be really pedantic a candle in a strong magnetic field is also a particle accelerator. You can even build a Farnsworth–Hirsch fusor for around 2k or less. But IMO a real particle accelerator need some sensors to find-out what happens after the collision.

no. he's made a fluorescent tube.

No, he's made an X-ray machine, and apparently set it up in a department store.

This is why we can't have cool magazines anymore.

You know I hadn't thought of that but at 45kV he probably is generating some soft x-rays. Sort of depends on what his anode is made of. I can never remember how to spell Bremsstrahlung sigh.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremsstrahlung

Remember this one when the Darwin Award nominations come around.

But it's handcrafted with organically shaped bulbs.

Hipster x-rays?

Can't be dangerous if it's 'natural'.

I was hoping for something a little more "Ghostbustery".

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