Thursday, September 23, 2010

Don’t cross the LHC stream

Don't cross the LHC stream
What would happen if you put a hand in LHC beam?
I think most of the question has already been answered. After experiment, LHC beam is dumped into beam dump which is made from graphite. It heats graphite to quite high temperatures, while making some secondary radiation, but it does not stop within first few centimetres of graphite. Your hand is not graphite, but it is close enough. Also, note that while the energy is equivalent to the kinetic energy of the cargo airplane, momentum is fairly small (it does not have a lot of punch).

So what I believe would happen is that it would *burn* a hole through your hand, turning a line into steam, while giving you a fatal dose of all sorts of secondary radiation from collision of protons with atoms in your hand, and sending some hydraulic compression shock wave (from steam expansion) through your body, which may or may not kill you when it reaches vital organs (i would guess it won't be strong enough to kill you, but i dont know if it will rip your hand apart). To summarize, you're gonna die if you stick your hand in LHC beam, i would say probably from radiation poisoning.

edit: correction. The beam energy is 350 megajoules, and the length of beam dump is 700 centimetres. I would say that the beam surely deposits >0.5 megajoule per centimetre at the entry, that is, your hand is going to get >1 megajoule deposited, significant fraction of this as heat. That is >250 grams of TNT . I would guess >1kg of TNT even, as the beam dump is so long as to stop the beam entirely, the beam deposits most of energy near start of dump. So I would guess that resulting explosion would kill you in a quite messy way, but at least it would be a quite quick death.

Saturday, September 18, 2010

New The Polynomial video.





See the homepage for more info.

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Another 50-megapixel screenshot.

A gigantic 'screenshot' from my game The Polynomial


Click to see the full image in its 50 megapixels glory.

See if you can even locate this fragment in full image.

That goes to demonstrate power of procedural generation. The Polynomial loads up in about one or two seconds, far faster than your web browser. And it supports this resolution - I am not doing anything special, I am simply drawing to the memory instead of display device, using my regular draw routine!

50 megapixel screenshot

Enjoy the 50-megapixel screenshot

Monday, September 13, 2010

Programmer's Day

Wow, it is programmer's day today. Apparently.