What happens if you put your hand in the beam of the Large Hadron Collider?

[WillParkinson]

There are a lot of questions in science that seem simple, but in fact lead to profound concepts. Why is the sky dark at night? Why does gravity pull me down? Why is the Sun hot?

And some questions seem silly and frivolous, but it turns out are really hard to answer, and in fact scientists might disagree on the answer. Case in point: what happens if you put your hand in the beam of the Large Hadron Collider?

So the folks at Sixty Symbols asked this of several scientists, and the first four minutes of this video are the result:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/09/21/dont-cross-the-lhc-stream/

(On edit: Capitalization error.)

[tridim]

1. Hehe, I love the video.

It's amazing that they don't know!

I think it'll go right through, causing some cell damage along the way just like other high energy particles.

[n2doc]

2. It would burn a tiny hole through your hand

It has been estimated that it has enough energy to burn right through a 500 Kg block of Copper.

Beam dump article:


http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/astrophysics/cern-to-start-up-the-large-hadron-collider-now-heres-how-it-plans-to-stop-it

[Champion Jack]

3. Crap. I was hoping it would give you super powers

[karnac]

4. easy to test and get some idea

Test one. Put a raw stake in the path and see what happens.

Test two. Put a frog's leg in the path. Be interesting to see if it twitches or explodes.

hope there is no mess.

[pokerfan]

5. "It would be bad"

Dr. Spengler: There's something very important I forgot to tell you.
Dr. Venkman: What?
Dr. Spengler: Don't cross the streams.
Dr. Venkman: Why?
Dr. Spengler: It would be bad.
Dr. Venkman: I'm fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, "bad"?
Dr. Spengler: Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.

[caraher]

6. Maybe hard to answer offhand...

Give any of those folks a little time to look up some numbers and it wouldn't be such a hard question to answer (beyond the trivial answer that says you *can't* stick your hand in the beam because it's inside a tube, and if you spoil the vacuum there's no more beam).

[Posteritatis]

7. "that's like the energy of an aircraft carrier moving at eleven knots"

That sounds like it would be bad for your hand, to say nothing of the body attached to it.

A few people in the comments mention Anatoli Bugorski, who got his head drilled with a particle beam in the seventies and survived - survived! - something like 2-3000 Grays of radiation. Of course, that beam would be vastly lower energy than the LHC's at full power...

[CHIMO]

8. No More

Hand.

[TheMadMonk]

9. Another question. Could you accellerate something macroscopic in it?

What is the fastest collison of a macroscopic object achieved.