• Question: What is the most harmful substance you have worked with?

    Asked by crowntown100 to Andrew on 14 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Andrew Maynard

      Andrew Maynard answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      Hi crowntown100,

      I don’t know – as a physicist, I try and leave the nasty stuff to the chemists!

      I did some work with very fine glass fibers many years ago, which can damage your lungs if you inhale them – I was pretty careful handling that stuff. And I have worked with carbon nanotubes – a reasonably new material that might be dangerous if you inhale it (but we don’t know all the details yet, which was why I was studying it). I also used to work in labs that used hydrofluoric acid – that’s really nasty stuff, but I never needed to use it myself.

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