Can Ping-Pong Balls Revolutionize Particle Acceleration?

[LowlyPion]

27 km ping-pong ball accelerator.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=large-hadron-collider-first-beam&sc=rss

Well at least that works.

 

[Cgall24]

yay ping pong

 

[WarPhalange]

I wonder how much they spent on those ping pong balls. You know they didn't just go to Wal-mart and buy a box of them. They had to special order them from Germany to make sure they have an equal ratio of ping to pong and that had to go through all sorts of red tape.

 

[LowlyPion]

I wonder how much they spent on those ping pong balls. You know they didn't just go to Wal-mart and buy a box of them. They had to special order them from Germany to make sure they have an equal ratio of ping to pong and that had to go through all sorts of red tape.

What was not clear to me was whether they had already turned the fridges on and the tubes were supercooled, which if a ping-pong ball were to shatter in transit would surely have been a rather large potential cleanup - larger than what they were testing to avoid.

 

[tribdog]

Had me worried when I saw the title of your thread. Thought maybe you had taken a little trip to the border.