Scientists create most powerful indoor magnetic field, blow up own lab

Apparently, scientists like to take risks.

I dunno. Ask Doc Brown.

(technically, it’s the original pronunciation of "gigawatts. But Doc Brown must have been literally old school)

I love the comment below the Canadian Toonie (scroll down a bit). The bad writing only adds to the horror.

“However, his blast shield failed during the shot, and he sustained considerable damage to his lab from shrapnel from the exploding work coil…”

The wire making that work coil looks to be only about 0.1 inches in diameter. Must be insane velocities for it to do “considerable damage” to the surrounding lab space.

Actually, looking elsewhere on the page I see they report velocities up to 5000 FPS for the work coil fragments. I think that’s a good bit faster than the muzzle velocity of pretty much any handheld rifle.

No pretty much about it. Highest velocity of a rifle bullet: 4135-fps for the .17 Remington (scroll down). A whole lotta propellant pushing a dinky, little bullet.

My chemistry teacher in gymnasium lacked the most of two fingers on his right hand (he had lost in a lab accident, everybody knew this). He was an ass, but that gave him some mighty creds.

Those guys should patent their time-travel device; I clicked on that link and suddenly it’s 1995 again. Was that website built using FrontPage?

So, anyone ever explained why it didn’t pull down the telephone wires as it walked through them? It wasn’t as if it had a high step or anything.

Wondered that myself. :dubious:

Just like at the old Bussman/Cooper plant in St. Louis. After a hard day of testing fuses and capacitors for faults, they’d crank up the power in the test chamber by about 50x and blow some innocent component into atoms. Very entertaining for plant tours.