Suddenly, nothing else mattered. I wanted to know... about gravity and particles and and relativity. About stars and atoms and light and energy. Abov… - Suzie Sheehy

So that's one example of how a wave can be used to accelerate particles, but... I brought along some scale model protons [large beach balls] and I thought what I'd get you to do is for you guys to be the wave and the scale model protons are going to accelerate across the wave [beach balls moved by audience hand wave]... Eleven-year-olds do this really well, I'm warning you. You've got competition.

Radiation effects. ...There's this guy, , who... before the days of such strict health and safety, somehow managed to bypass a safety mechanism on an accelerator, and stick his head in a 76 GeV proton beam. Now that's quite a lot lower than the Large Hadron Collider beam, but the amazing thing is that he just saw a really bright flash, and he didn't feel any pain at all... Most people think, "Well, this beam, it's got lots of energy. It will just destroy you" but actually that's not quite what happened. ...[A]fter it happened his face swelled right up and the skin on that side pealed off, but he didn't die. ...[H]e went on to get his PhD and... he worked as a scientist for many years... [H]e's actally still alive in Russia, living in relative obscurity. ...A journalist interviewed him few years ago and... because the side of his face that the beam irradiated was paralyzed... and he hasn't been able to move the skin on that side of his face for so many years. That side of his face like it was... the day that this accident occurred. When I... read this, I was like, "Miracle cure for aging!" Yea, paralyzed face is probably not a miracle cure...

[S]ometimes some of our craziest ideas, and I've been through some pretty crazy ideas of things that you could do with a particle accelerator here... [S]ometimes they turn out to be surprisingly good ones if you do them in the right way, and these machines are not just useful for particle physics. They're useful for all sorts of other things like cancer treatment, like killing bacteria in food, and other things I haven't discussed like carbon dating, and imaging down to the atomic scale, and all sorts of other things...