The Large Hadron Collider accelerates protons to near the speed of light so throwing an M&M down there could be catastrophic. <\/p>
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is capable of accelerating a proton to almost the speed of light<\/a>. An M&M travelling at this speed would be devastating. If it hit a solid object, it would release the equivalent of about 80 times the energy from the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.\u00a0<\/p> Fortunately, this wouldn\u2019t happen, because the LHC can only accelerate subatomic particles and nuclei. An M&M is almost 500 trillion, trillion times heavier and even if you could ionise its surface evenly so that it could be accelerated by the collider\u2019s electromagnetic fields, the top speed it could reach would be about 6cm (approx 2in) per hour.\u00a0<\/p> Read more:<\/strong><\/p> Asked by: Ria Fisher,\u00a0Via email<\/strong><\/p> To submit your questions email us at questions@sciencefocus.com (don’t forget to include your name and location)<\/em><\/p> <\/body><\/html>\n The Large Hadron Collider accelerates protons to near the speed of light so throwing an M&M down there could be catastrophic. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":36199,"template":"","categories":[1],"acf":{"readingTimeMinutes":"< 1"},"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2023\/11\/no-you-absolutely-cannot-drop-candy-into-the-large-hadron-collider-heres-why.jpg",1200,801,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2023\/11\/no-you-absolutely-cannot-drop-candy-into-the-large-hadron-collider-heres-why-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2023\/11\/no-you-absolutely-cannot-drop-candy-into-the-large-hadron-collider-heres-why-300x200.jpg",300,200,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2023\/11\/no-you-absolutely-cannot-drop-candy-into-the-large-hadron-collider-heres-why-768x513.jpg",768,513,true],"large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2023\/11\/no-you-absolutely-cannot-drop-candy-into-the-large-hadron-collider-heres-why-1024x684.jpg",800,534,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2023\/11\/no-you-absolutely-cannot-drop-candy-into-the-large-hadron-collider-heres-why.jpg",1200,801,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2023\/11\/no-you-absolutely-cannot-drop-candy-into-the-large-hadron-collider-heres-why.jpg",1200,801,false]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"importmanagerhub@sprylab.com","author_link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcsciencefocus\/author\/importmanagerhubsprylab-com\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"The Large Hadron Collider accelerates protons to near the speed of light so throwing an M&M down there could be catastrophic.","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcsciencefocus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed\/36198"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcsciencefocus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcsciencefocus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/rss_feed"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcsciencefocus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcsciencefocus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcsciencefocus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcsciencefocus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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