Since the launch of the Large Hadron Collider, which became, in fact, the first particle accelerator to capture public attention, many have been wondering what happens if a living person is in the path of its main beam?
Well, fortunately (or unfortunately?) We don't need to guess - this is exactly what happened to the Russian scientist Anatoly Bugorsky in 1978. Let's find out how it was …
On July 13, 1978, Anatoly Bugorsky, a researcher from the Institute of High Energy Physics of the USSR, during the repair of the U-70 synchrophasotron (the most powerful particle accelerator in the world at the time of its construction) accidentally found himself in the path of the main proton beam of the accelerator.
The event happened by chance: during the previous experiment, a high beam intensity was not needed, so the automatic door lock, as it turned out later, was turned off. The sign on the door did not glow because of a burned out light bulb. In addition, Bugorsky, having called the remote control, said that he would be in the channel in five minutes, and apparently arrived a little earlier than the operator removed the beam. Anatoly Petrovich bent down to the instruments and his head fell into an invisible danger zone.
The beam entered his skull on the left side of the back of the head and exited to the left of the nose. Various sources disagree in their estimates of how much ionizing radiation Anatoly received at that moment, but some say that about 200,000 - 300,000 are glad. In any case, the beam was strong enough to burn a hole in bone, skin, and brain tissue.
According to Anatoly, at that moment he saw a flash, "which was brighter than a thousand suns", but did not feel any pain. Over the next few days, the left side of his head became monstrously swollen and the skin began to fall off. Bugorsky was taken to Moscow, where doctors prepared to witness his apparently imminent death - but somehow Anatoly survived. Today the left side of his face is paralyzed due to nerve damage, his left ear cannot hear, and from time to time he suffers from seizures, but in all other respects Anatoly is completely healthy. He managed to finish his doctoral dissertation and is still alive.
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A radiation dose of 200,000 - 300,000 would be glad if it were absorbed by the human body, it was more than enough for acute radiation sickness and death. In the case of Bugorsky, the proton beam turned out to be so narrowly focused that it went straight through the body - if it were a little wider and hit more cells, Anatoly would most likely have died.
To be fair, it should be said that by modern standards the Soviet U-70 is a rather weak accelerator. When the Large Hadron Collider is launched again in 2015, it will have a collision energy of two proton beams of about 70 TeV - almost 200 times more than the 67 GeV of the U-70.
Anatoly Bugovsky today. You can see that the left side of his face is slightly pushed down due to paralysis, and there are no wrinkles on it due to the fact that it has not moved for 26 years.