Making Antimatter While Not Blowing The School — The Michio Kaku Story
Michio Kaku built a 2 MeV particle accelerator in his home for his school project in order to produce antimatter.
(Wikipedia Commons)
I first saw Michio Kaku in a youtube video explaining ‘Universe In A Nutshell’ and have been his fan since then. He is an American theoretical physicist who specialises in string theory, written more than 70 articles published in physics journals, covering topics such as superstring theory, supergravity, supersymmetry, and hadronic physics. and authored many books including my favourite ‘Physics of the Impossible’. He is known for explaining complex physics stuff in comprehensible way to mere mortals like us. Do check out his videos or books.
When he was in high school, he decided to build a 2.3 million electron volt particle accelerator in order to produce antimatter for his school project. Yes! A particle accelerator for a high school project! You read that right. So like a good obidient son he asked his mother for permission and for some reasons totally incomprehensible to me or my mother, she said “Okay!”
So he went to Westinghouse and Varian Associates to buy 182 kg of transformer steel and 35 kilometer of copper wire. He assembled his betatron accelerator in his mother’s garage (Americans and their miracle producing garages). His atom smasher’s magnetic coil could produce magnetic field of 10,000 Gauss (20,000 times the Earth’s magnetic field). His goal was to generate a beam of gamma rays powerful enough to create antimatter. The machine required 6 KW of power so turning it on would frequently blew the fuse in the house.
His mother must be regretting her decision already.
(Wikipedia)
His project took him to National Science Fair in Albuquerque, New Mexico where he was noticed by Edward Teller (father of the hydrogen bomb and kind of a bad guy in the movie ‘Oppenheimer’). #spoiler_alert if you have not seen the movie. Writing spoiler alert after writing the spoiler makes it redundant. Anyway. Teller took him under his wings. Kaku was awarded Hertz Engineering Scholarship and went to Harvard University for further studies fulfilling his dream of becoming a theoretical physicist. He went on to the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley and received a Ph.D. in 1972. In 1973, he held a lectureship at Princeton University.
A particle accelerator for a school project! I was not able to find whether he was successful or not but I am assuming he was not. I don’t remember what my physics project was in high school but it definitely was nothing compared to his.
Do tell about your high school physics project.
Sources
- Physics of the Future — Michio Kaku
- Wikipedia
- https://mkaku.org/home/about/
