The Incredible Story of Anatoli Bugorski: Surviving a Proton Beam

 Have you ever wondered what would happen if you stuck your head inside a particle accelerator? No? Well, neither did Anatoli Bugorski, but he found out anyway. And lived to tell the tale.

Anatoli Bugorski was a Russian particle physicist who worked at the U-70 synchrotron, the largest particle accelerator in the Soviet Union, in 1978.

One day, he was checking a malfunctioning piece of equipment when he accidentally leaned over the beam path and got zapped by a 76 GeV proton beam. That’s about 200,000 times more powerful than a dental X-ray.

You might think that such an encounter would instantly vaporize his head, or at least turn him into a super-villain with mind control powers. But surprisingly, Bugorski felt no pain and saw only a flash of light “brighter than a thousand suns”.

He didn’t even realize what had happened until he noticed that his face was swollen and peeling off.

He rushed to a hospital in Moscow where doctors expected him to die within days from radiation poisoning. But Bugorski defied all odds and survived....<<<Read More>>>...