Try something for me. ...Hold [the tube] halfway down. [Half of the lamp goes out] ...You're grounding any of the electrons which are... moving insid… - Suzie Sheehy

Now it's not obvious to most people how this acceleration mechanism of using a wave to accelerate particles actually works. So I have a little demonstration... of an everyday example where I can use a wave to accelerate some particles. This is just an ordinary fluorescent tube that you have in the ceiling... Over here I have a plasma ball which has a 30 kHz oscillating AC voltage supply. So there's a voltage, it's a couple of kilovolts that's going up and down, up and down, up and down in the center of that thing, 30,000 times a second. And because of that, out of the plasma ball... comes an electromagnetic wave that's traveling... through space. So move towards the plasma ball and point the fluorescent tube toward the plasma ball. [It lights up] ...So actually if you move it away, notice that it's still on. Now a lot of people show this demonstration with the fluorescent tube touching the plasma ball and say that it's something about completing a circuit... It's not. It's the electromagnetic wave that's coming out... which is traveling through the fluorescent tube, exciting the electrons inside. ...you know how a fluorescent tube works.

Now there's another one... that might not have an electric charge... The gold atom, yes. Can anyone suggest a way to get that gold atom into a particle accelerator? ...You can ionize it. Thank you. So to ionize a gold atom you can rip the electrons off or add more electrons on... Give it an electric charge, and then we can put it into a particle accelerator. So that's the kind of particles we need.

So it's interesting, even though it seems like a stupid question to say what would happen if you stuck your head in it. It does actually present some interesting real problems in engineering, in actually designing these machines.