Ghostbusters: 7 Scientific Facts To Make You Hate It Less

1.Don't Cross The Streams

Don't cross the streams… It would be bad… Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.

We know that crossing the streams is a bad move, but exactly why is still a little vague. This is odd, considering we have a real-world analogue of the proton packs here on Earth and, what's more, it crosses the streams all the time.

As we've previously discussed, those proton packs are essentially miniaturised particle accelerators like the one at CERN, and the raison d'etre of particle accelerators is pretty much exclusively to smash beams of protons together just to see what happens.

As it happens, each proton collision is like a mini Big Bang. As the beams of protons whizz through the tunnels, they are travelling at impossibly high speeds, just under the speed of light in fact, which means that when they collide, a vast amount of energy is released and exotic subatomic particles are spontaneously created. Colliding a beam of just 3,000 protons will produce enough energy to melt 1,100 pounds of copper. Remember we're talking about just a few thousand protons here, a beam that is even remotely visible, let alone able to hold a wriggling ghost, will contain quadrillions more, releasing cataclysmic amounts of energy.

So yeah, don't cross the streams.

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