So you can actually put your head in the beam of an accelerator and survive it. And he's not the only one to have done it. - Suzie Sheehy

I'll tell you very briefly how they work. ...The first thing we need is some ...s, or even atoms themselves perhaps.

So the final thing that you probably shouldn't do with a particle accelerator is: You probably shouldn't destroy the Earth with it. ...People seem to think that when we design new massive particle accelerators that are going to have particles that are huge energies that we've never created before in the lab, that somehow... we just built it for the lulls, and then we're going to destroy the earth with it, and that we haven't quite thought it through, and that we're not quite sure what we're doing... If you're at all concerned, please go to HasTheLargeHadronColliderDestroyedTheWorldYet.com and... you can tell me what you find there.

I have a demonstration... which is the simplest particle accelerator I could make.... in a giant salad bowl. ...[W]hen it goes over the charged strip it picks up the same charge and it gets repelled ...then it hits the grounded strip and it dumps all of that charge, but it keeps its momentum, it keeps rolling around ...So every time it goes over one of those four [repelling] strips ....it gets a kick, or gets accelerated and it gains energy again and again. ...In this demonstration, the ball has to change charge, and fundamental particles don't change charge, so in this case my voltage in constant and the ...[ball] changes charge, in a real accelerator we have a constant charged particle, and that means we have to change the voltage.