The device is hyped up a bit by articles such as Astounding School project. It's more like a super Cathode Ray Tube than any sort of mini LHC.

Image source: above link.

To quote the man himself:

And then I went to Westinghouse. I got 400 pounds of transformer steel, 22 miles of copper wire, and built a 2.3-million electron-volt betatron in the garage. The wire was so heavy, I put the wire on the goal post [of the nearby high school football field] and I gave it to my mother. She ran with this strand of wire to the 50-yard line. My father grabbed it, ran to the goalpost and we wound 22 miles of copper wire on the football field. Well, the magnetic field was so powerful—about 20,000 times the Earth’s magnetic field. If you were to walk by my atom smasher, it would pull the fillings out of your teeth—that’s how powerful the magnet was going to be.”

So the magic words "atom smasher" were used by Kaku himself, in his book on String theory "Hyperphysics" and possibly that is an apt description.

But when it was plugged in,it knocked out many domestic fuses in the surrounding neighborhood.

I think Kaku is slightly tongue in cheek / self disparaging when he calls it an atom smasher, and this, allied with the complaining neighbors, makes me doubt if he got the chance to run it very often.

The device is hyped up a bit by articles such as Astounding School project. It's more like a super Cathode Ray Tube than any sort of mini LHC.

Image source: above link.

To quote the man himself:

And then I went to Westinghouse. I got 400 pounds of transformer steel, 22 miles of copper wire, and built a 2.3-million electron-volt betatron in the garage. The wire was so heavy, I put the wire on the goal post [of the nearby high school football field] and I gave it to my mother. She ran with this strand of wire to the 50-yard line. My father grabbed it, ran to the goalpost and we wound 22 miles of copper wire on the football field. Well, the magnetic field was so powerful—about 20,000 times the Earth’s magnetic field. If you were to walk by my atom smasher, it would pull the fillings out of your teeth—that’s how powerful the magnet was going to be.”

So the magic words "atom smasher" were used by Kaku himself, in his book on String theory "Hyperphysics" (and possibly that is an apt description).

But when it was plugged in, it knocked out many domestic fuses in the surrounding neighborhood.

I think Kaku is slightly tongue in cheek / self disparaging when he calls it an atom smasher, and this, allied with the complaining neighbors, makes me doubt if he got the chance to run it very often to smash atoms.

The device is hyped up a bit by articles such as Astounding School project. It's more like a super Cathode Ray Tube than any sort of mini LHC.

Image source: above link.

To quote the man himself:

And then I went to Westinghouse. I got 400 pounds of transformer steel, 22 miles of copper wire, and built a 2.3-million electron-volt betatron in the garage. The wire was so heavy, I put the wire on the goal post [of the nearby high school football field] and I gave it to my mother. She ran with this strand of wire to the 50-yard line. My father grabbed it, ran to the goalpost and we wound 22 miles of copper wire on the football field. Well, the magnetic field was so powerful—about 20,000 times the Earth’s magnetic field. If you were to walk by my atom smasher, it would pull the fillings out of your teeth—that’s how powerful the magnet was going to be.”

So the magic words "atom smasher" were used by Kaku himself, in his book on String theory "Hyperphysics" and possibly that is an apt description.

But did this device actually smash atoms? By the laws of probability, possibly it did.

The device is hyped up a bit by articles such as Astounding School project. It's more like a super Cathode Ray Tube than any sort of mini LHC.

Image source: above link.

To quote the man himself:

And then I went to Westinghouse. I got 400 pounds of transformer steel, 22 miles of copper wire, and built a 2.3-million electron-volt betatron in the garage. The wire was so heavy, I put the wire on the goal post [of the nearby high school football field] and I gave it to my mother. She ran with this strand of wire to the 50-yard line. My father grabbed it, ran to the goalpost and we wound 22 miles of copper wire on the football field. Well, the magnetic field was so powerful—about 20,000 times the Earth’s magnetic field. If you were to walk by my atom smasher, it would pull the fillings out of your teeth—that’s how powerful the magnet was going to be.”

So the magic words "atom smasher" were used by Kaku himself, in his book on String theory "Hyperphysics" and possibly that is an apt description.

But when it was plugged in,it knocked out many domestic fuses in the surrounding neighborhood.

I think Kaku is slightly tongue in cheek / self disparaging when he calls it an atom smasher, and this, allied with the complaining neighbors, makes me doubt if he got the chance to run it very often.