Beats a Lava Lamp

Has anybody seen the new plasma particle accelerator technology profiled in the February issue of Scientific American? Oh, man. So frickin’ cool! I so want one of these. The thing is super tiny. It fits on a tabletop. a tabletop! Imagine the things I could do with it!

Why didn’t these come out in time for Christmas?I would have asked Santa. I was really good last year! I totally deserved one.

Okay, deep down I know I’d just play with it for a few days, then get bored and stick it in the closet. Maybe I’d pull it out on rainy days and run some high-energy particle experiments. But for now, all I can think about is a shiny new plasma particle accelerator with polarity inversion.

So frickin’ cool.

4 thoughts on “Beats a Lava Lamp

  1. Rob

    Alas and darn it, there’s not really that much you could do with the tabletop unit that would be fun. You can’t make anti-hydrogen that lasts for any reasonable amount of time. Muonium only lasts for 10^-21 sec. I think the thing’s powerful enough to cleaving collagen at make some glucose that emits a positron, but then you’d need the PET scanner to have any real fun with it.

    You’re not going to detect any deviations from General Relativity and the Standard Model with it. What happens to your electric bill you don’t want to think about.

    I suppose you could find out how many beta particles it takes to destroy a Twinkie, but the electricity bill would be horrendous.

    Trust me, you want to ask for the “Little Scientist Genetic Engineering Kit” for Christmas next year. We’ll have you making one-eyed cats in no time!

  2. Rob

    Eliminate the “cleaving collagen at” fragment above. It jumped in from something I deleted. No one wants to hear about the biochemistry I did one summer.

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