width =45%> Posted on 05/07/2021 12:08:29 PM PDT by Red Badger
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Particle accelerators are machines that propel charged particles at incredible speeds, generally to collide with other particles. It's highly advisable that the particles the high-speed particles collide with should not be part of your head, as one man learned the hard way.
On July 13, 1978, particle physicist Anatoli Bugorski was working his job at the U-70 synchrotron, the largest particle accelerator in the Soviet Union. The 36-year-old was inspecting a piece of equipment that had malfunctioned when the accident happened. Unbeknownst to him, several safety mechanisms had also failed, meaning that when he leaned over to get a good look at his task, a proton beam shot through the back of his head at close to the speed of light.
Or at least, closer to the speed of light than you'd like a proton beam to be traveling at when it shoots clean through your face.
At first, he felt no pain. He knew what had happened, as he had seen a light “brighter than a thousand Suns," as well as the gravity of the situation. At this point, he didn't tell a soul, and merely completed his day's work before heading home and waited for the inevitable to happen.
Absorbing 5 grays (500 rads) of radiation would usually lead to death. Though he didn't yet know it, he had been hit with between 2,000-3,000 grays (200,000-300,000 rads). In the night, his face began to swell beyond recognition, prompting him to visit the doctors the following morning. From there, he was taken to a clinic in Moscow, though largely so that his death could be observed rather than for any expectation that his life could be saved.
The next few days saw his skin peel off around the entry and exit wounds, showing a clean path burned right through his skin, skull, and brain.
Remarkably, he did not die. The brain tissue continued to burn away over the ensuing years, and his face became paralyzed on the left side, where his hearing was also lost. Weirder still, as he aged the right side of his head showed signs of aging, while the left side did not.
Over the next few decades, he experienced seizures but remained functional, continued his work as a physicist, and completed a PhD. As far as people who have put their heads into a particle accelerator go (and to be fair, that's a demographic of one) he was pretty lucky. The narrow focus of the beam, though it caused massive damage, likely kept the damage limited to an area of brain that he could live without.
For the decade after his accident, he was unable to tell anyone about it, given the notorious secrecy of the Soviet Union. He survived well beyond the end of the USSR, however. In fact, the man who put his head in a particle accelerator and lived to tell the tale remains alive to this day.
“Weirder still, as he aged the right side of his head showed signs of aging, while the left side did not.”
If there’s not a mad scientist researching this, I’ve lost my faith in mad scientists.
We could make a fortune in Hollywood!...............
At least it wasn’t on ‘Mertilize’...
I’m confused. Particle beams occur in ultra-high vacuum. If he “stuck his head in there” the vacuum would have been broken and the beam scattered by air molecules. Am I missing something?
Question: what was the first thing to go through his mind?
Depends on how big the tube is.
If it’s very large, the vacuum would take a few seconds to dissipate..................
A proton....................
Fist of all, lousy safety procedures. The person going into harms way should have had a padlock on the breaker. Secondly, multiple safety features do not just “fail”.
Bad design. Safety of people was never a high priority in the USSR.
There are those who would blame Communism, which was used to kill off millions of capable and caring Russians, but Communism was an inevitable next step for those who already had the mindset and embraced its implementation. There are a lot of former Soviets here in the U.S. who still think and act with the same unimaginative and callous mindset of their parents and grandparents.
Connections to Florida?
As I understand it, doctors use proton beams for very precise surgeries, such as brain surgery and prostate surgery. Apparently it is a single proton, which is said to be able to be aimed with almost molecular precision, thus minimizing damage to surrounding tissue. It’s kind of a sad story, what this guy went through, but he is likely one of the luckiest, or unluckiest men on the planet, depending on your perspective. From what I’ve read, proton beam prostate surgery is the best form of said surgery, if it must be done. There are only a handful of institutions which perform this surgery, however, due to the immense cost of a medical-grade proton beam accelarator.
Not too interested in how he supposedly survived a beam of protons...
What is more interesting is how he managed to get his head into a high-vacuum chamber and, then, why he didn’t die of asphyxiation...
Are we talking about an accident with a proton beam or some synchrotron radiation?
[three seconds earlier] "What's in here?"
Lock Out Tag Out is when Maintenance locks and powers down a machine before working on it.
One of my cousins got a severe head injury from LOTO being overlooked on a repair job.
No.
But it might help. We could try.
Anything is better than this.
Try this at home using your microwave oven : )
Lamest superpower ever.
This reminded me of a satirical headline from a newspaper named after a root vegetable that can't be posted here: High school photographer dies from lukemia after radioactive spider bite.
Trust the science.
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