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Comment by jackfoxy | Hacker News Reader

The notable exception being Nikola Tesla, who was both a mad scientist and a mad engineer.

The Manhattan Project physicists occupy a dual space as well. Their ultimate hypothesis was "hmm, maybe building a bomb this way will work", and the experimental setup was "build it and try exploding it in the desert", which is a pretty engineeringy kind of science experiment. (Of course, there were plenty of earlier, more basic-physics experiments leading up to it.)

My favourite part of that experiment was that they believed there to be a non-zero chance that it would trigger an uncontrollable reaction that would ignite the atmosphere and end the whole world but did it anyway.

Come on... There is a non- zero chance of me turning into a potato too and that hasn't happ

Crazy, isn't it? But I guess they felt the risk was worth it. I assume that's how the scientists working on the LHC feel.

Nah, the LHC dudes think there's an actual zero risk. The LHC doesn't produce collisions of any magnitude greater than collisions that occur in the upper atmosphere (from what I understand). That was the ultimate debunk of things like the whole "microscopic black hole will eat the earth" thing.

The black hole would evaporate so quickly it wouldn't be able to pull in any matter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation

The Manhattan Project physicists -- in particular J. Robert Oppenheimer -- joined Victor Frankenstein as archetypal mad scientists post-WWII.

In particular, fictional mad scientists tend to implicitly operate in the manner you describe: by the time they're building fully functional death rays with which to threaten the world, they've presumably carried out maybe tens or hundreds of experiments to see if the new form of radiation from a crystal meteorite energy source could be channelled and weaponized.

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