7/20/2019

Oh, Wikipedia, when you talk like that!

"An alternative to the synchrocyclotron is the isochronous cyclotron, which has a magnetic field that increases with radius, rather than with time." 

Thank you, wikipedia. Also, well, duh.  Of course!  But they fall short of telling me how to build one in my secret laboratory. 

A good wiki-wander, like the dinner table conversation around casa Crowndot, is topologically indistinguishable from a Rube Goldberg mouse trap, only without all that distracting utility. 

...the electronvolt was devised as a standard unit of measure through its usefulness in electrostatic particle accelerator sciences, because a particle with electric charge has an energy E = qV after passing through the potential V; if q is quoted in integer units of the elementary charge and the potential in volts, one gets an energy in eV.
Hmm.  You don't say!

But it doesn't get me any closer to finding out whether an old computer CRT repurposed into a particle pointer of whatever energy value (for purely aesthetic purposes I am partial to "in the two to four MeV range" just because I learned how to say that on Wikipedia) can be used to knock out the electronics in those head-banger cars that pass the house in the middle of the night blasting their tooth loosening low frequency audio. 

After all, Earnest Orlando Lawrence (the Lawrence Hall of Science Lawrence) and Niels Edlefsen built their first cyclotron out of basic household materials (if your house includes things like brass sheet-metal, baling wire, and sealing wax?) and it was small enough to hold in one hand.  I learned that on Wikipedia! 



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