The man who stuck his head in a particle accelerator

2018-01-19 10:35

The man who stuck his head in a particle accelerator
What happens if you put your hand under the particle beam in the accelerator?

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Except for the fact that the ring of the synchrotron accelerated particles fly in a vacuum, you can do a thought experiment and try to predict consequences. And you can refer to the experience of man, his synchrotron in the head.

Particles flying in the tunnels of the synchrotrons around the world, have amazing energy, with which in ordinary life to face the person does not have. Even in the medical devices alpha particles, which doctors bombard cancer with energy not higher than 250 million electron volts, and the energy of the particles in the accelerator beam is measured in billions of EV. Their effect on the person long time was solely the subject of thought experiments, until July 13, 1978, a Soviet physicist Anatoly Buharskie put his head under pockock of protons in the synchrotron U-70 in Protvino.

On that historic day out of service defense mechanism and a beam of protons at a speed close to the speed of light that has passed through the skull and brain Bugorski, when he stooped to perform minor repairs defective parts. Given an input of 200,000 x-ray, and the output is more due to scattering by material — 300 000 x-rays, the scientist was still alive, he defended his dissertation, begun before the incident, and worked all his life at the same synchrotron, however, still suffers from seizures, and his face seemed split in two parts, one of which looks a bit younger than the other.

Anatoly Bugorski, 2009. The incident a long time in silence, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union physicist began giving interviews in which he talked about how he saw a bright flash, but do not feel pain. The doctors still have not found his body cancer markers, although radiation often causes cancer. Maybe it’s that over the head Bugorski was exactly focused beam of particles that managed to catch very few cells of a limited number of tissues.