A bullet to the head will most of the time cause instant death. But what about a beam from a particle accelerator traveling at slightly below the speed of light? This poor guy found out the hard way when he stuck his head into a malfunctioning particle accelerator in the former Soviet Union. When Soviet things malfunction, they do it in style! Think of what lawyers would have done with this in the States. If it happened today, the lawsuit would have to be for quadrillions of dollars, since the government has jumped the shark on trillions by now!
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I've got to read more about that incident. Don't worry - I won't go sticking any part of my body in the Tevatron beam. That'd be pretty damn hard to do anyway.
ReplyDeleteActually, this story has some grain of reality in it, although I'd guess that poor fellow hadn't planned to do it. In earlier (low energy, low intensity) days of particle accelerators, people would actually "look" for extracted beams by sticking their face in and seeing the Cerenkov radiation as the beam went through their eye. (I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to Google about Cerenkov radiation.)
Thanks for the physics update from America's largest particle accelerator! It's good to know that only half his face and brain were rendered useless in the mishap. That he could then go on to get his degree doesn,'t say a lot for the Soviet education system!
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