In the U.S. if you see this green symbol on your food, that doesn't mean it's organic. It means it's been irradiated, which is a little bit misleadin… - Suzie Sheehy

I mean you guys are a rubbish accelerator, but we do that very very precisely. ...So what happens in a synchrotron... is that you have to time that wave very very precisely with the increase in the magnetic field in order to get the particles all synchronized, and that's why we call it a synchrotron.

In answer to some of the questions that we had a few years ago when the Large Hadron Collider started up... "Could it destroy the world?" ...The most convincing answer to me as to why it couldn't, is because we have particles in outer space from cosmic rays and things like that, at much much higher energies than we could ever dream of creating in the lab. And so far they haven't done anything catastrophic to us and we're perfectly fine. So in terms of just reaching a higher and higher energy... it doesn't really matter what we do in the lab. We should be safe on earth from these high energy particles.

There's this guy called Monsier Mangetout... a Frenchman who, according to Wikipedia ate all of these crazy things. Even he, though, wouldn't eat a particle accelerator because parts of the machine become radioactive, and while he seems to be fairly stupid, given the things he ate, even he wouldn't go that far.