# Tag Info

48

Amazingly this actually happened to a Russian scientist called Anatoli Bugorski (WARNING: this is pretty gruesome). The beam basically just killed all the tissue it passed through. The symptoms were the relatively mundane ones expected from tissue death. The LHC has a much, much greater energy than the one that struck Bugorski, so it would cause a lot more ...

44

Is it even possible to hit 350Gs of force to a hard drive? Sure is. Drop it on the floor. You are thinking about sustained forces. 350g sustained won't happen even in rocket launches. But momentary forces can easily peak at this level. Note that the G limit on the drive is for when it's not running. No spinning drive will like 350g, except maybe in ...

34

A charged particle will create charge separation (ionization) along its path. This will cause harmful chemical reactions to occur in the body, including DNA damage. The effects of these chemical reactions depend on their amount. The body can heal from a low amount on its own, while a high amount will cause radiation sickness and probably death. This can be ...

30

Look at it this way: Suppose you are in a train travelling at 10 m/s. Somebody inside the train throws a ball at you in the opposite direction at 10 m/s. You feel the pain belonging to your first experiment. However, somebody looking at this experiment from outside the train would say that the ball is standing still and you are travelling towards the ball ...

20

It is a standard exercise in quantum electrodynamics to find the angular dependence of the differential cross section. Which more or less means how probable it is for the photons to scatter at a certain angle, given the energy of the incident particles. So assuming the spins of the electron-positron pair is averaged, and that you don't care about the photon ...

16

Here's an application where an ability to withstand high shock is important. Explosions. In the mid 1980s I did work for a mining company's research laboratory (BHP Research, now defunct like all Australian corporate research). We would lower data-logging computers into boreholes to set up a grid of dataloggers, then detonate a charge of known energy at a ...

14

Elastic collisions do happen at the LHC. The TOTEM experiment measures the differential cross section (rate as a function of angle) for proton-proton elastic scattering at the LHC. Here is their latest result. They don't publish an estimate of the elastic cross section, but according to their data it must be at least 25 mb (millibarns) (my first version of ...

14

We do. The LHC accelerates two protons, each with 3.5 TeV of energy, giving a total of 7 TeV in the CoM frame (The energies are from the initial phase of the previous LHC run. Later in the run this was increased to 8 TeV and the combination of the two dataset was what discovered the Higgs boson. The energies are roughly doubling now for Run II, to 13 TeV). ...

13

Nothing happens obviously, when one high energy particle penetrates flesh as cosmic rays continuously impinge on us and some have the energies of the LHC. The cosmic rays reaching us are mainly muons and the damage they do is with electromagnetic scatters/ionisations in their path. The mean energy of muons reaching sea level is about 4 GeV. Muons, being ...

10

A simple counterexample: Imagine two particles with opposite direction and equal speed. The center of mass does not move, yet the kinetic energy of the system is non-zero. Now let both particles come to rest (by friction, hitting a wall, whatever). The kinetic energy is now zero, and total momentum has been conserved, while energy is not. The crucial ...

9

Let's take everything out of our scenario other than you and the ball. No baseball stadium, no Earth, no spherical cows, NOTHING in the entire universe but you and the ball. (Nope, not even microwave background radiation) Now the question has changed. Now you need to ask whether it's possible to decide whether you're moving towards the ball or vice versa.

8

While people normally quote Newton's Second law as $\vec F = m \vec a$, it is better written as $$\vec F = \frac{d\vec p}{dt}$$ Force is a rate of change in momentum. This means that the average force applied when an object undergoes some discrete change in its momentum is $$F_{\text{avg}} = \frac{\Delta p }{\Delta t}$$ The change in your momentum ...

8

Anything that is not forbidden must happen. That's an important statement to keep in mind when approaching quantum physics. It doesn't mean that anything that can happen always happens, but it must happen at some time or another just like someone eventually has to win the lottery. That said, some protons do go through the LHC, ram into each other and ...

7

TL;DR: If you have to choose either "near the handle" or "near the tip", the tip will work better. But there's a point in between these two that works even better; exactly where that point is depends on how you swing the sword, and how its weight is distributed. UPDATED now I am near a computer and can draw diagrams etc. If cutting off the zombie's head ...

6

While a single LHC particle wouldn't be doing much harm, being hit by the LHC beam would be certainly deadly and it would damage the machine badly. Any dense matter that comes into the LHC beam will instantly act as a beam dump. We have a very good idea about what happens in the LHC beam dump, see e.g. ...

6

Regardless of the physical undefinability of "painfulness", I'd like to plug some numbers in a particular scenario: Let's have a momentum of $p = 1000$m$\cdot$kg/s, A 0.25kg bullet would be fatal, moving at $v = 1000/0.25 = 4000$m/s, while a 2000kg car moves at $v=0.5$m/s, So at least in this scenario and particularly for relatively low momentum ...

6

elementary particles (e.g. protons) Protons aren't elementary particles, they're made of partons (quarks and gluons) in "soup". Below, $\lambda$ is the wavelength corresponding to the energy of the interaction via the usual de Broglie relation and $r_p$ is the radius of the proton. At low energy with $\lambda >> r_p$ the interactions are just ...

5

Momentum is conserved in magnitude and direction. So in order to analyze any situation of momentum conservation, you should always start with $$\sum \mathbf p_{i}=\sum\mathbf p_f$$ where the subscripts denote the initial and final momenta. As to the ball & wall, you are correct that momentum is not conserved if you are only looking at the ball. If you ...

5

Unless I'm missing an easy way to do this problem it seems a surprisingly hard one. This diagram shows the problem (I've exaggerated the altitude of the satellite to make the diagram clearer): The satellites are in circular orbits (dotted line) at a distance $r$ from the centre of the Earth, so their orbital velocity as (as you say): $$v = ... 5 Let's turn this around. In an inelastic collision, some of the energy, instead of remaining with the center of mass of the objects colliding, is dissipated as heat - an increase in the random motion of the atoms and molecules of the objects colliding. At the (sub) atomic level, the two particles involved in a simple collision are the same two objects that ... 5 Possibly your confusion arises from not considering that KE is a scalar, whilst momentum is a vector. Yes, there is of course a connection between KE and momentum: K = p^2/2m (for non-relativistic bodies). Thus, for two equal-mass particles heading directly towards each other at equal speeds v, their velocities are \pm {\bf v} and their momenta \pm ... 5 Yes , the normal to the surface is the direction of reaction force. And the direction doesnt depend on the material of the object . But note that if friction is considered , direction of net reaction force changes 5 I would reason along these lines. Put the system in the centre of mass. Then, at collision, consider the plane through the centre of mass and perpendicular to the line through the centres of the balls. Since this plane is fixed in the frame of the centre of mass, this behaves like a wall the balls smash against, and therefore the velocity vectors after ... 5 The problem is equivalent to 4 spheres colliding simultaneously, where top sphere center is at 60^o relative to the x'x axes (same goes for bottom sphere): We'll name them: sphere A (dark blue), and spheres 1, 2, and 3. During the collision the spheres will behave like springs with an infinite hook constant. The forces on the spheres will be ... 5 Many modern particle accelerators do accelerate both particles towards each other. LEP accelerated electrons and positrons in opposite directions in the same chamber, and the Tevatron did the same for protons and antiprotons. The LHC is a proton-proton collider, and so it has two stacked rings that accelerate protons in different directions. For the BaBar ... 5 No mater the inertial referential: The pain is linked to the energy dissipated by the change of speed of the 2 objects in any inertial referential. Remarque 1: a part of the energy can be absorbed by the ball by deformation or heating. So a soft ball would make less pain. Remarque 2: The pain depends on what is static behind you and what is static behind ... 4 Is there no relation between the momentum and kinetic energy? Are they not linked with each other? No, they're not. Conservation of momentum only says that$$m_1 v_{1_-} + m_2 v_{2_-} = m_1 v_{1_+} + m_2 v_{2_+} I used subscripts 1 and 2 denote the particles involved in the collision and the subscripts - and + denote the pre- and post-collision ...

4

In answer to the main question, matter does, in fact, "pass" through other matter. Starting from the macro scale (stars , galaxies), down to the micro scale (atoms), it happens all the time. The "free" movement of matter starts to get impeded, as the atoms start making latices (solids, crystals). But even at this scale, as Rutherford demonstrated, matter ...

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