What happens if you put your head in a particle accelerator?

on the day of the accident the only thing standing between anatoly burgoski's brain and a beam of protons traveling close to the speed of light were a lock and a light bulb anatoly petrovich bergoski was an employee of the protovinsky institute of high energy physics the beating heart of the science town of provino outside of moscow russia and in 1978 anatoly a 36 year old particle physicist was one of the scientists working with the largest russian atom smasher the u-70 synchrotron which lurks below protvino and magnetically accelerates protons in a one and a half kilometer long circular tube completely evacuated of air to just one kilometer per hour below the fastest speed in the universe on june 3rd of that year a series of simple mistakes would answer a question that no one asked what would artificially accelerated protons carrying 70 billion electron volts of energy do when they pass through a human brain this is the true story of anatoly burgoski's personal chernobyl [Music] on june 3rd 1987 burgoski was a few meters below the earth surrounding moscow looking after the u-70 synchrotron's detector system with the hopes of eliminating some temporary failures it had been experiencing as protocol dictated he called the control room and told the beam operators that he'd be in the experiment hall in five minutes the beam operators needed to know this because in the experiment hall the main proton beam is shunted off from the main ring and directed through the open air at various detectors what should have happened next is that the control room should have removed the beam from the chamber borgoski was heading towards the door to that chamber should have been locked and a sign should have been illuminated telling burgoski that the beam was still very much active inside but he didn't see any of this instead what he saw was a flash reportedly brighter than a thousand suns particle accelerators are easily the most complicated machines on earth they are colossal constructions the awe-inspiring endpoint of hundreds of the brightest mines thousands of superconducting magnets hundreds of thousands of kilograms of liquid helium and more wire than you can even wrap your head around the large hadron collider for example pictured here contains approximately 1 billion miles of superconducting wire that's enough wire to go around the full orbit of earth not its circumference its orbit twice the wire in this machine could line a path from the earth to the sun and back six times scientists use the absurdly impressive engineering of these accelerators to study the fundamentals of the universe the structure of matter space and time and the interactions between atoms and their constituents at their most basic this is done by accelerating particles through a near perfect vacuum with magnets and smashing them together at near light speed to record what happens with sophisticated detectors bugorski was intimately familiar with the physics here and he was about to get closer to it than any human before or since murphy's law is the adage that anything that can go wrong will go wrong and the day a high-energy particle beam pierced a physicist's brain everything did bugorski asked the control room to remove the beam in the experiment hall in five minutes but he arrived at the chamber earlier than expected the automatic lock that should have prevented bugorski from entering the room was turned off the previous experiment was using a low intensity beam and apparently someone thought that locking the door was overkill in the last line of defense a single light bulb that illuminated a sign indicating the danger beyond burnt out just before bugorski arrived an experienced operator bugorski did reportedly have doubts about entering the unlocked door to the chamber so easily but he proceeded anyway inside of the chamber packets of protons were still flying silently and invisibly through the open air a pulsing beam between where bugorski was and where he needed to go and so when he bent down to check the instruments as he had done many times before bugorski was instantly blinded when his head intercepted a particle beam humming with many trillions of protons moving at nearly 300 million meters per second the subatomic particles each carrying 70 billion electron volts of energy effortlessly pass through bougorski's brain skin and skull according to a later report he felt no pain incredibly the physicist wasn't instantly killed as you may expect but after he saw a thousand sons bugorski knew he was in serious trouble anatoly calmly finished his work in the chamber logged the visit in a journal as usual and then without saying a word to anyone about the accident went home the next morning after a night of worrying symptoms bugorski was brought before doctors and dosametrists the left side of his head was swollen translating from the official case history anatoly's doctors immediately calculated the dose he had received quote an intense beam of high-energy protons with a transverse size of 2x3 millimeters passed along the trajectory occipital region of the head mediobasal regions of the left temporal region pyramid of the left temporal bone bony labyrinth of the middle ear tympanic cavity jaw fossa tissues of the left wing of the nose the radiation dose at the entrance is 200 000 renkins at the exit it is more due to scattering on the material three hundred thousand rent guns in theory the dose of ionizing radiation that is one hundred percent lethal is just one thousand redkens three hundred times less than what had been apparently absorbed by anatoly's brain the magnitude of these numbers begs the question why didn't he die that day when you hear a value like 70 billion electron volts it's a way of quantifying the kinetic energy of particles the energy of motion and if particles with kinetic energy suddenly start encountering a medium other than vacuum they will interact and lose some of that energy in a biological material like your body this deposited energy is going into ionizing your atoms breaking up molecules creating heat and otherwise smashing nanoscale structures enough of this damage will eventually end any living thing through the creation of cancer or the initiation of widespread organ failure and so particles entering a medium bump into matter and lose energy as kinetic energy is the energy of motion these many interactions will as the particle proceeds slow the particle down and eventually stop it and where a certain particle will stop is not a mystery to nuclear physicists it's something that can be calculated for example alpha particles pushing through the air at a defined energy will stop after only a few centimeters this is due to the stopping power of air stopping power is a measure of the ability of a material to slow down energetic particles that travel in its interior understanding stopping power is very important in nuclear physics but this knowledge can be practical too it has recently given us a new way to fight the cancers that ionization can sometimes cause when a high-energy massive particle like a proton moves through matter it will lose energy as we said but more specifically its energy will diminish in inverse proportion to its velocity squared therefore a proton will deposit the majority of its energy in a material right before it stops this is what nuclear physicists call the bragg peak and if scientists know how much an energy a particle will lose and where it will be lost then in theory a particle beam could be directed to enter a material and disrupt or destroy only a certain volume of that material well this is exactly what so-called particle therapy does heavy particles from a small accelerator are pointed at a person's body and lose almost all of their energy at a calculated distance inside and no further particle therapy at its best can even pass through a person's skull to damage and destroy brain tumors non-invasively [Music] anatoly burgowski's brain effectively received the most overpowered particle therapy session in human history and so again why didn't he die the answer is the brag peak of the beam that he crossed and the stopping power of human flesh for example look at how far a beam of protons will travel through water a similar density to human flesh at an energy 300 times less than what anatoly experienced it's only around 25 centimeters or a foot your head is likely not even 25 centimeters in depth therefore the protons in this graph would not dump all of their energy in your head they'd pass right through it and even more powerful beams protons would then be able to travel even further before stopping anatoly's brain matter literally did not have the stopping power to bring the beam's high-energy protons to a stop and to create a bragg peak inside of his skull this is why burgoski did not even come close to receiving the full dose that the u-70 synchrotron could theoretically deposit and that is why the actual radiation dose was so small nowhere near hundreds of thousands of renkins that he crossed the beam in the way that he did of course was pure luck as was the path the beam took through his face missing critical brain areas and blood vessels still the fraction of energy he did absorb was enough to change borgoski's mind and body forever when the doctors and scientists improv vino first heard burgoski's story they didn't believe him but the symptoms and the severity of the situation an unprecedented accident involving the largest accelerator in the country soon convinced them the physicist was whisked away to moscow to the sixth hospital inside the ministry of media machine building which actually specialized in radiation injuries after the meltdown of chernobyl reactor number four in 1986 the world discovered via intense media coverage that such a hospital even existed and according to an article published by the ecological truth organization in 1998 it had no shortage of patience the hospital in moscow treated the victims of accidents at nuclear reactors both research and military nuclear material production plants and on nuclear submarines but no one had seen a patient like anatoly burgoski before his face had swollen up beyond recognition over the next few days the actual path the proton beam took was revealed by peeling skin and lost hair given this face value few staff in the icu thought bugorski would live including angelina guzkova a pioneer of radiation medicine in the ussr and the same woman who headed up the treatment of every victim of the chernobyl disaster but with her overseeing his treatment mugorski did indeed recover however what those treatments were how long each took how bogorsky recovered specifically is unknown everything every document and report every statement and testimony related to his treatment was immediately classified a year and a half later bugorski returned to protvino to work on the exact same beam and instruments that caused the world's first human slash particle accelerator accident while scientists were publishing papers and dissertations surrounding the bugorski phenomenon behind closed doors bugorski was working and required to return to the radiation hospital in moscow twice a year to continue his treatment and to commune with other nuclear accident victims like former inmates bugorski told wired magazine in 1997 we were always aware of one another quote there aren't that many of us and we know one another's life stories generally these are sad tales though anatoly had survived an incredibly dangerous situation his personal chernobyl had only just begun after a proton beam blasted through his brain hearing in his left ear completely disappeared he started having epileptic seizures any mental effort was accompanied by extreme fatigue the nerves on the left side of his face were destroyed freezing his expression in place there for the last 43 years and when he concentrates only half of his forehead wrinkles the decades following bugorski's accident were not easy though the physicist was able to defend his phd in 1980 which he prepared before the accident obtaining the medicine and treatment he needed was a bureaucratic nightmare in the soviet union so-called radiation patients were only legally recognized after the chernobyl disaster in 1986 this meant again according to the ecological truth organization in 1998 quote the entire material side of the cost of treatment and other compensation for damage to the health of victims is somehow legally related to chernobyl end quote bogorski therefore had the right to compensation and benefits established by the law of the russian federation for quote the social protection of citizens exposed to radiation as a result of the chernobyl disaster but of course bugorski's health had nothing to do with the actual chernobyl disaster this confusion made him ineligible for the state insurance he was entitled to and badly needed officials apparently found it too difficult to understand or process this mini chernobyl bugorski had been through for a long time they flat out refused to establish a new kind of disability group for him and no group meant even more difficulty getting health benefits thankfully anatoly wasn't completely alone in this battle against the red tape of the once red state the protovinsky institute of high energy physics and his colleagues at work did what they could as did related labs and physicists working at cern the current site of the large hadron collider the well-known american entrepreneur and philanthropist george soros even bypassed bureaucracy to establish a small grant for bugorski by 1997 however confusion around what benefits burkowski was actually entitled to from the state caught up with him that year a ban was placed on releasing more funds for anatoly's continued treatment which included insanely expensive drugs and examinations the reason the specific wording on the documentation for his radiation disease said nothing of his unique encounter with a particle accelerator or indicated that he was part of a select few with similar injuries it simply said that bugorski had experienced an accident eligibility revoked he did not speak publicly about his accident for over a decade but talking with wired magazine in 1997 the gear his health was put into his own hands anatoly burgoski said that he would like to make himself available for study by western scientists and presumably have his health looked after by them but he admitted that he didn't have the money to leave the science town of provino or leave the particle accelerator underneath that passed through his brain like it was barely there i am being tested he said the human capacity for survival is being tested until next time thank you so much to the very nerdy staff at the facility for their direct and substantial support in the creation of this here video today especially i want to recognize research assistant comatose and visiting scholar simon gould if you want to join the facility if you want to drape on a silky white lab coat get videos before anyone else join our discord get behind the scenes stuff get members only live streams with yours truly not like that you can go to patreon.com kyle hill and join the facility today and as you can see if you support us just enough you get your name on arya here each and every week and as you can see there's literally hundreds of you so i have no idea how i'm gonna pass the anatoli bergoski is really a specimen of what the human can endure as an animal not only did he survive billions of electron volts with a particle beam passing through his brain as a young boy he survived an electric shock incident with a broken wire and when he was just a month and a half old he was thrown out of a window by nazis into the snow and survived in the snow as a baby for a couple of hours he's been through a lot i don't know what he's doing today but hopefully if he's watching this i wish you all the best and man you're not very lucky though thanks for watching

Channel: Kyle Hill

Views: 2,927,978

Rating: 4.9242444 out of 5

Keywords: because science, engineering, kyle hill, learning, math, physics, science, stem, the facility, particle accelerator, large hadron collider, particle physics, anatoli, anatoli bugorski, U-70, what happens if, particle accelerator explained, what if, the large hadron collider

Id: mD4J5VUwiAs

Length: 17min 20sec (1040 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 26 2021