• Question: have you ever accidentally blown something up

    Asked by 9joke to Andrew on 27 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Andrew Thomas

      Andrew Thomas answered on 27 Jun 2012:


      Never accidentally. I do blow things up on purpose in my schools lecture. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKHJjKvzrKA

      We did have a fire once during an experiment. We had started the experiment and the new person in our team, Sam, asked, “Does it always smoke like that?” Me and my boss were, “Yes, that’s OK”. Then Sam said, “Really, always that much smoke?” So I looked inside the experiment and there were flames two feet high. I had just had fire extinguisher training the day before so I grabbed one and put the fire out while a colleague set the fire alarm off. The next day we were told off… for using the fire extinguisher. They said we should have just got out even though we had a laser in there worth half a million pounds.

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