Technology is really about knowledge. I found it instructive and also amusing to discover that
the theoretical physicist, Michio Kaku, built himself an atom smasher in the
garage of his home—while still in high school! The more formal name for such
things is “particle accelerator.” Here is the story as told in Kaku’s book, Hyperspace, p. 6-7:
First, I purchased a small quantity of sodium-22, which is
radioactive and naturally emits positrons (the antimatter counterpart of
electrons). Then I built what is called a cloud chamber, which makes visible
the tracks left by subatomic particles. I was able to take hundreds of
beautiful photographs of the tracks left behind by antimatter. Next I scavenged
around large electronic warehouses in the area, assembled the necessary
hardware, including hundreds of pounds of scrap transformer steel, and built a
2.3-million-electron-volt betatron [accelerator] in my garage that would be
powerful enough to produce a beam of antielectrons. To construct the monstrous
magnets necessary for the betatron, I convinced my parents to help me wind 22
miles of copper wire on the high-school football field. We spent Christmas
vacation on the 50-yard line, winding and assembling the massive coils that
would bend the paths of the high-energy electrons.
And Kaku succeeded.
He produced “a magnetic field 20,000 times more powerful than the earth’s
magnetic field, which is necessary to accelerate a beam of electrons.” To be
sure, most of the time he turned it on, he blew every fuse in the house.
Where there is knowledge, and a will, the most peculiar feats are possible. Fermilab certainly had
the knowledge to keep on operating Tevatron, the world’s second largest hadron
collider. But Fermilab’s “parents,” read Congress, didn’t want to spend Christmas
coiling miles of cable…
In the book it says "cooper wire" lol. A spelling mistake from a theoretical physicist? :/
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