Question: Have you ever had an experiment go terribly wrong. e.g. blowing yourself up?

Lynne Thomas answered on 17 Jun 2014:

I thankfully have never had an experiment go terribly wrong. If you squeeze things too hard in the experiments, then the bits of kit we use to apply the pressures can explode in places. I know people who work on explosive materials and sometimes they can accidentally set off explosions. The crystals are always really small though so it doesn’t cause much damage!

The biggest thing that can go wrong in my experiments is burning holes in things using the X-rays and lasers, both of which are very powerful. Or we can accidentally cause bits of our equipment to crash into each other – they are often quite heavy and complicated. And if we do crash them badly, we can cause thousands of pounds worth of damage! We have lots of safety measures in place though so it should stop anything bad from happening either to the equipment or to us whilst we are carrying out the experiment.