• Question: If you were in death row, what would be your last experiment?

    Asked by rehaaa to Joel, Kristian, Tim, Venus, Zachary on 18 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Kristian Harder

      Kristian Harder answered on 18 Nov 2013:

      First of all, in any reasonable and liberal country, I’d be unlikely to ever end up on death row. Or so I hope. 🙂
      Also, I’d probably be more interested in legal experiments to get me out, rather than physics experiments to answer a last question about the universe or two. 🙂 Plus, the equipment usually available in prison cells may not be exactly suitable for running big scientific experiments.
      I might try to quantum tunnel myself out through sheer willpower, but we all know the inevitable outcome of that attempt. 🙂
      So maybe the best idea would not be to experiment (other than with lawyers) but to think up theories about the world and write them down. But that’s more Tim’s and Venus’s line of work. 🙂

    • Photo: Tim Hollowood

      Tim Hollowood answered on 19 Nov 2013:

      I am a theoretical physicist and so I do most of my experiments in my head or on my laptop. But if I could do anything I would do an experiment to find out what Dark Energy is. This is a form of energy that fills space and we know it’s there because it is making the universe expand faster and faster. But we still don’t really know what it is. There are some theories and it would be nice to test them. Unfortunately we don’t know how to do these experiments yet!

    • Photo: Joel Goldstein

      Joel Goldstein answered on 19 Nov 2013:

      I would want to build the successor to the LHC – a particle collider in a 100km long underground tunnel. This would be partly to answer all of the questions that the LHC can’t, but mainly so I can run down the tunnel and escape.

    • Photo: Zachary Williamson

      Zachary Williamson answered on 20 Nov 2013:

      Oh dear, hopefully I’ll never be in that situation!

      Is this one of those things where money isn’t an issue? If it’s not then I’d build a neutrino detector which a million tons of stuff called liquid argon. Not only would it be a gazillion times better at detecting neutrinos than what we have, it would also take about 40-50 years to build and run, so hopefully I’d die of old age before it finishes and I get thrown back on death row 🙂

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