Physics and Explosions

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Goshawk31

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I'm trying to find something that might blow up (spectacularly) in a physics lab. My character is trying to prove the reality of the multiverse. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
 

FletcherHavarti

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I'm trying to find something that might blow up (spectacularly) in a physics lab. My character is trying to prove the reality of the multiverse. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

How high-tech is this physics lab? A few micrograms (or nanograms) of antimatter getting loose would be pretty destructive and, I daresay, spectacular. Nobody's produced very much antimatter in the real world, so that's only viable if your story takes place in the future. Are you looking for a small explosion that does a little damage, or something that destroys the lab entirely (maybe along with half the city)?
 

Goshawk31

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I mostly want to destroy the man working in the lab, although the lab can go too.
 

FletcherHavarti

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I mostly want to destroy the man working in the lab, although the lab can go too.

Your mention of the multiverse makes me think of experiments involving subatomic particles. If your lab does experiments involving fast-moving particles, there are plenty of things that can go wrong with that equipment. For example, bubble chambers (not used so much anymore, sadly) are filled with liquid hydrogen, which can explode satisfactorily if it leaks and mixes with oxygen. Newer equipment like wire chambers may use other kinds of flammable or explosive materials.

Then there are huge facilities like the Large Hadron Collider, which can have serious accidents if something goes wrong with the massive magnets that are used in the system. If you want to delve into weird particle collision scenarios, there is the possibility of accidentally creating black holes or strangelets... but at that point we're talking about accidents with the potential to swallow up Planet Earth (which may be overkill in your case).
 

Goshawk31

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Oh my, yes. Don't want to blow up the planet. Thanks all the info! A very big help.
 

Lakey

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Quenching a helium-cooled magnet can be pretty spectacular and dangerous. Think the sort of large electromagnet of the type used for MRIs; inside the case are the coils, immersed in liquid helium so that they are superconducting or at least have very, very low resistance. What happens when the magnet quenches is that it warms up just enough to stop being superconducting or to gain a little resistance, causing the coils to heat up and catastrophically boil off all the helium at once. Anything clamped to the outside of the tank - flanges, mounting supports, experiments - will get launched from the force of the expanding gas. The lab I worked in when I was a graduate student had a damaged beam in the ceiling where an experimental apparatus had been launched during a quench (before I joined the lab). The experiment had to be rebuilt from scratch, but more than that, the student who was working on the experiment at the time was lucky not to be in its path.

:e2coffee:
 

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How realistic are we talking? If we're talking more sci-fi than reality you could do something like the resonance cascade in Half-Life. If there's delicate electrical equipment (like to control or observe experiments) a large enough spike of electricity can blow those up. Sudden heating from accidentally setting something radioactive into super-critical-ness can cause problems, too (tickling the dragons tail is always so wild to me and I wish more people knew about it).
 
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