Within the mythos of Iron Man, I don't think that's crazy.'Д«ut there are two things in the scene that are crazy to Satogata: One, that Stark would just stand in the room with his accelerator and expose himself to massive amounts of radiation and two, that the resulting elemental beam would only go in one direction. 'But then again, he's got a reactor in his chest that powers the Iron Man suit, so he could draw some of that power off and run his particle accelerator. 'For Stark to run his accelerator, he's gotta make a deal with his power company or he's gotta have some sort of serious power plant in his backyard,' Satogata says. 2.5 miles long, Brookhaven's superconducting collider needs 10 to 15 megawatts of power-enough for 10,000 or 15,000 homes. Powering the accelerator, however, might be an issue. 'So that's a little bit unrealistic unless he's got really, really strong magnets.' There's nothing to accelerate the particles, either, but Satogata says the RF cavities could be offscreen.

'For the types of things he's doing, he'd probably need much bigger magnets-I didn't even see any magnets,' Satogata says. 'As a matter of fact, occasionally you get a really smart teenager building one.' (Fun fact: The first particle accelerator, called a cyclotron, was 5 inches in diameter-small enough to hold.) You'd need a beam tube with a large vacuum, charged particles, magnets to bend the beam, and radio frequency oscillators, or RF cavities, to accelerate the particles. Most of the new elements that get created like this last billionths of a second before they disintegrate.' Because of this instability, it's very difficult to store elements as Stark does in his arc reactor: They need to be moving at nearly the speed of light.Д«ut could someone build a particle accelerator in his home (or tiny lab), like Tony Stark does? The answer might surprise you. 'You smash the nuclei of particles together, and sometimes enough of them stick together that a new element is created a new nucleus of an element that's heavy enough to be stable,' Satogata says. And while they are can create new elements-an event that occurs every 5 or 10 years-it doesn't happen exactly as Iron Man 2 portrays it. 'There are good things and bad things about the portrayals of particle accelerators in media.'ДЄccording to Satogata, particle accelerators are built to accelerate and collide neutrons, protons and other the subatomic particles at very high speeds.

'Particle accelerators have been in the zeitgeist for a couple of years now because of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland,' says Todd Satogata, a physicist in the Collider-Accelerator Department at Brookhaven National Labs. (Check out the scene in the trailer, below, at around the 1:18 mark.) It all seems very easy, at least for someone like Tony Stark. When he flips on the switch, two beams of light collide, creating a third beam that Stark steers (using a wrench, and with much destruction to the walls of his workshop) into a brand new arc reactor. Stark's only option is to create a new element-which he does by constructing a particle accelerator in his workshop out of some metal tubes.

And the fast-talking industrialist has exhausted the rest of the periodic table looking for an element that is a safer power source than palladium. The palladium that powers Tony Stark's arc reactor-and, by extension, his Iron Man exoskeleton suit-is slowly leaking into his bloodstream and killing him.

Iron man 2 arc reactor