Iron Man 2 home-made particle accelerator

There’s the question of whether or not it’s really possible to build a particle accelerator in your own home with sufficient power to create a new element.

The short answer: why yes, you can build your own particle accelerator. It’s already been done by physicist Michio Kaku, who built a 2.3-million-electron-volt accelerator (called a betatron) in his parents’ garage for his high school science fair project because he “wanted to play about with antimatter.”

The long answer is a bit more complicated, as Satogata’s analysis makes clear. The basic building blocks are 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. Based solely on what’s depicted on screen, Tony Stark seems to be missing RF cavities (although they could be off-screen), and his magnets don’t appear to be large enough for maximum steerage.

There’s also the question of where he’s getting the juice to run his homemade accelerator: on the order of 10 to 15 megawatts, enough to run over 10,000 homes. “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.” I humbly suggest that if Stark can build a tiny fusion reactor to operate his suit, finding the energy to run an accelerator isn’t his biggest problem.

Okay, so while there’s a real-world basis for this pivotal scene in Iron Man 2, it’s not yet something within the reach of our most brilliant scientists. But our most brilliant scientists aren’t Tony Stark — that’s why he’s a superhero; he can achieve what mere mortals cannot. Emory University’s Sid Perkowitz, author of Hollywood Science, explains:

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