Experts have unveiled what it would feel like if you were to stick your hand into the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - the world’s largest and highest-energy particle collider.
The LHC has been dominating headlines following the announcement that it would be shutting down at the end of the month for its annual year-end technical stop.
The 27-kilometre-shy ‘death machine’ was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008 and is situated 175 meters beneath the France-Switzerland border near Geneva.
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Over the years, scientists have used the LHC to collide particles at four different crossing points.
In 2012, their experiments resulted in the discovery of the Higgs boson and the ability to study other unresolved questions in particle physics.
According to Live Science, experiments are conducted in a tunnel where proton beams collide with one another at around 99.9999991 percent the speed of light.
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This crash usually causes an obscene amount of kinetic energy and can focus the energy of an aircraft carrier.
Sixty Symbols, video journalists who specialise in quirky videos centered on physics and astronomy, once headed to see the LHC and asked experts what would happen to your hand if it was to get in the middle of the collision.
“Certainly wouldn’t advise doing that,” said David Barney, a physicist who worked on the CMS experiment at the LHC.
“The safety we have implemented here is that there’s zero possibility you could ever do that, so let’s make it a theoretical experiment that you did that.
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“The beam itself is focused down very tightly, it’s less than a millimetre across, extremely intense.”
He went on to say that the massive amount of energy would ‘make a hole’ straight through a person’s hand but that your whole body would end up being irradiated.
“You’d die pretty quickly,” Barney bluntly added, before claiming he hadn’t actually thought about the scenario ‘very much’.
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To get a second opinion, Sixty Symbols spoke to Steve Goldfarb of the ATLAS Experiment.
After hearing the same question as his colleague, Goldfarb said: “When there’s beam, it will hurt. There’s a train going through there at full speed—that’s the amount of energy that there is.
“So it would hurt your hand quite a bit. It’s going to burn right through you. It’s going to burn through that soft tissue."
LHC - the so-called ‘death machine’ - will continue to run experiments up until October 28. After this date, it will be temporarily shut down until sometime in 2025.