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Michio Kaku once said that He build an atom smasher in his garage as a science fair project in high school. He said he used 400 pounds of transformer steel and 22 miles of copper wire. But I would like to know how he did it exactly? Can you give me more details about it ?

Not : Kaku said he built a betatronic accelerator. How is that possible at home ?

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    $\begingroup$ A betatron is a particle accelerator, that is fairly easy to build. Its just a bunch of coils wrapped around, and a vacuum environment to accelerate the particles (mostly electrons). However, it is not an atom smasher.. $\endgroup$
    – Physicist137
    Commented Jul 6, 2017 at 11:24
  • $\begingroup$ Yes, probably the website had done some mistake by saying atom smasher. So, should I wrap the copper wire around vacuum? $\endgroup$
    – Ç.Eti
    Commented Jul 6, 2017 at 11:28
  • $\begingroup$ Er no. It is evidently not that simple. For instance, you need to control the strength of the magnetic field at all times according to the electron energy. Also, obviously, you need an electron source. You need mechanisms to beam the electron out of the machine once accelerated, and several more things. This pdf might be a nice read. I meant to say that, all of this can be accomplished by coils, and few capacitors (except perhaps the electron source). $\endgroup$
    – Physicist137
    Commented Jul 6, 2017 at 11:37
  • $\begingroup$ Frankly, I'm surprised his garage was capable of supplying the power required to run a particle accelerator in tandem with a vacuum pump of sufficient capacity. But I suppose if he could afford all the parts to build it, he could afford special power accommodations. Still, I doubt it accelerated electrons very much. Probably for the best, all things considered $\endgroup$
    – Jim
    Commented Jul 6, 2017 at 12:07
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    $\begingroup$ A Tesla coil, simple rf bottle ion source, and a vacuum beamline can certainly be built by reasonably competent folks in their garage. With a few hundred keV protons you can perform the $^{7}Li (p,\alpha)\alpha$ reaction. Or, build a Cockroft-Walton supply and replicate their experiment correctly. (The Tesla coil provides a range of proton energies, with the C-W you control the proton energy.) $\endgroup$
    – Jon Custer
    Commented Jul 6, 2017 at 13:01

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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.

enter image description here

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.

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  • $\begingroup$ Why would the magnetic field pull the fillings? As we can find on MRI related sites, they are not affected by the magnetic field. Would the paramagnetism of the alloy be enough to generate enough force on the fillings? He may be speaking in a metaphoric way. But then one may wonder how much is true and how much is just made up for the sake of making science more interesting. :) $\endgroup$
    – nasu
    Commented Jul 6, 2017 at 15:02
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    $\begingroup$ A year ago I had a head MRI, it was 3 Tesla. No teeth problems occurred. I think Kaku is sending himself up here a bit, but although it would be straightforward to calculate the magnetic field of his machine, I have no idea of how strong the tooth filling bond is. TV and high book sales pay well, far more per than lab work on an hourly basis. Honestly though, I think Kaku enjoys spreading the word about science, which is in my opinion, more important than ever today. $\endgroup$
    – user154420
    Commented Jul 6, 2017 at 15:13
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    $\begingroup$ He's absolutely making some fun of his youthful mixture of ambition, enough knowledge to be dangerus and enough ignorance to not understand the scale of what he proposed. He knew enough to figure what the project was supposed to do and how it was suppose to work, but not enough to figure the power demands. Which implies that there were many other quantitative details that were left undone. $\endgroup$
    – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten
    Commented Jul 6, 2017 at 15:19
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I do imagine he is exaggerating this claim however on the same note I have built a betatron from a plain incandescent light bulb using the driver from a plasma globe and two speaker magnets. That is a cakewalk. I also attempted to build a ten thousand volt transformer as a driver to a tesla coil. That failed as I had not enough iron for the magnetic flux. I caused a brown out every time I ran it. It did produce enough voltage to break two inches of air though. That kind of set up though is expensive. About the miles of copper. Yeah I can relate took me eight hours to wind one by hand for the secondary for my tesla coil I used 38 guage about as fine a thread as my hair for perspective.

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