Question: hav u had n e near death experiences while doin an expermnt?

Kristian Harder answered on 21 Nov 2013:

Not at work. We do work with a lot of dangerous stuff (extremely cold liquefied gases, radiation, high voltage, thousands of tons of heavy material, flammable gases, poisonous substances), but it’s all dealt with very professionally. There are always several layers of security.
So the closest I’ve come to death so far was always in my personal life. The worst was probably when I repaired a radio as a teenager, and wanted to test it before putting it back into its case. When I found it worked, I started putting the casing back on, moved a few wires out of the way – but had forgotten that it was still plugged in, and those were 230V live wires. That was quite a shock! (literally. 🙂 ) But apart from feeling very weak and wobbly for the rest of the day I seem to have survived it unharmed.
Another situation I remember was when driving a minivan with a heavy trailer. I was going a bit too fast, maybe 80 miles per hour, and suddenly (probably due to wind?) the trailer started swinging around, going left and right and left and right, each time pulling the van to the side. Once this happens, it tends to get worse and worse by itself, until you veer off the road or start to roll over. It became quite bad, we were already swerving across all three lanes of the motorway, it was going downhill and onto a high bridge. My passenger was screaming at me to brake and slow down, which kind of is the natural thing to do, but if I had done that I’d have made the trailer fly around, pull the car off the bridge, and we’d be dead now. So fortunately I remembered to do the only thing you can do in such a situation: I stepped on the accelerator and went to over 100mph to pull the trailer straight. That worked. But each time I pass that stretch of motorway again I remember what a close call this was!