What happens when you stick your head in a particle accelerator and get bombarded with a beam of protons? Pugorsky has been there

Accelerators can move particles infinitely close to the speed of light, which is as fast as we can go.

One might ask, if you can accelerate particles to such great speeds, why can't you put people in there so they can experience the speed of light.

Pugorsky, a former Soviet scientist, has something to say about why people can't get into accelerators.

He stuck his head into what was then the Soviet Union's U70 accelerator and was bombarded with high-velocity particles.

So, was Pugorsky just crazy enough to test himself, or was there a terrible scientific accident?

Let's turn the clock back to 1978.

Particle accelerator

Accelerators use an electric field to accelerate charged particles and thus have enormous energy.

A magnetic field is then used to constrain the charged particles to follow a set trajectory.

If these particles collide, things can happen, like the formation of new elements.

Technetium, the first man-made element in human history, was produced in 1937 by bombarding molybdenum 42 with deuterium nuclei in an accelerator.

In addition, the accelerator can also be used to produce radiation for human use, for medical treatment, agriculture, detection and other aspects.

In addition, particle accelerators are important for the study of microscopic physics, only it can be infinitely close to Einstein's mass-energy equation.

In accelerators, particles can travel at top speeds close to 99.99 percent of the speed of light, which is as fast as humans can create them.

Perhaps in the future it will go beyond the speed of light and enter the dimension of another civilization.

As a result, large particle accelerators are being built by countries interested in science.

In the 1960s, when the Soviet Union was at its peak, the U70 accelerator was built in Plotvino.

It was one of the most advanced and largest particle accelerators in the world at the time, with an acceleration ring of 1,500 meters in diameter.

In this ring, charged particles are accelerated for a series of particle experiments.

However, this also means that when the U70 breaks down, it will cost a lot of energy and money to repair it.

Because this big particle accelerator, it takes half a month to shut down, and it takes another half a month to turn it back on, so that's a whole month.

The money was small business, mainly scientific experiments delayed by glitches, which affected the development of science throughout the Soviet Union.

On July 13, 1978, one of the accelerator's rings broke down and had to be repaired.

At this time there are moving particles inside, in order to ensure the safety of maintenance personnel, it must be shut down.

But once you press the off button, it will be at least a month before you get back to normal work. At that time, the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union was already in a heated stage, and it was very likely that the Soviet Union would fall behind the United States in science within one month.

So Pugorsky, the Soviet scientist who repaired the malfunction, decided to venture inside the accelerator to fix it.

The collision of man and particle

The plan was to shut down the accelerator, but the particles inside would no longer be needed, deflect them into the concrete walls of the accelerator, and Pugorsky would make repairs inside.

However, there was a major accident in time. Pugorsky's head entered the inner ring of the fault zone early, and it happened to encounter a beam of high-energy particles with velocities of 10 to the 12th magnitude, producing more than 200,000 Roentgens of radiation.

For an instant, Pugorsky felt something puncture his head before he even had time to feel the pain.

He was taken to doctors in Moscow, who found that the area of impact was concentrated on the left side of Pugorsky's head, and that there were traces of the impact on his left temporal region, left ear bone and nose.

Cells in these areas begin to die, and hair and skin begin to fall out.

Pugorsky fell into a coma, became delirious and even lost the hearing in his left ear.

At that time, doctors had issued a critical notice, Pugorsky had no chance of survival.

But weeks later, Pugorsky miraculously survived.

Not only that, but the hair he lost has since grown back and the hearing in his left ear has returned. After six months of rehabilitation, Pugorsky seems to have no problems.

But on closer inspection, he was left with lifelong consequences.

The radiation from the particles destroyed the facial nerve on the left side of his face, and he developed a left-sided facial paralysis.

But Pugorsky's brain continued to function, and he continued to work in physics.

The radiation was more than 200,000 Roentgens, 400 times the human limit. Why was Pugorsky able to perform a miracle and survive?

How does a miracle happen?

Doctors believe Pugorsky will survive for two main reasons.

The first is that the beam didn't hit the core of his brain, which is the brainstem, the nerve center, but it only hit parts of the left hemisphere of his brain, none of which were fatal.

And the particles were so fast, they didn't stay in Pugorsky's head very long, so they didn't leave much radiation behind.

The second reason is that the stream of particles is high but not dense, because it has already begun to empty the tube. If it had been the usual stream of particles, Pugorsky's head would have simply disappeared.

Of course, doctors also said there was a stroke of luck involved, and if Pugorsky had stretched his head in earlier, it would have blown his whole head off.

If it penetrated the core of the brain, Pugorsky would be brain dead and probably died before he could get to the hospital.

Pugorsky's facial nerves were completely paralysed by the bombardment of the left side of his face, which left him unable to make any expressions and lost some of his energy.

Over time, it looked more and more different from the right side of his face as it developed wrinkles, while the left side "stayed young".

Pugorsky himself, however, saw the event as a profound exchange with physics that made him more aware of the power of particles, and later devoted himself to the study of particle acceleration.

The wall of the speed of light

Some people ask why accelerators accelerate all kinds of particle size matter, is a microscopic physics experiment.

Why can't we use accelerators on macroscopic objects? Like the space shuttle.

And even if you accelerate these particles, you're only going to go to the speed of light, you're not going to go to the speed of light, you're not going to go beyond the speed of light. Right?

It has to be mentioned here that the mass of an object is related to the speed of the object.

There is a misconception that the mass of an object is immutable, that it is a property constant of the object.

No, the mass of an object is divided into its rest mass and its moving mass.

The mass of motion is related to the speed of the object, the faster the speed, the greater the mass, when the speed of light, the mass of the object will reach infinity.

When an object becomes infinitely massive, one hypothesis is that it becomes a black hole, so it absorbs everything around it.

If you had an infinite mass, you would collapse, form a black hole, and you would die.

If the particles in the accelerator reach the speed of light, then all the other particles in the accelerator will be swallowed up, and these particles will become horrible beings, which means that maybe we will be swallowed up as well.

In addition, the faster an object moves, the shorter its length becomes, and when the speed of light is reached, the length of an object becomes infinitesimally small.

To sum up, if an object travels at the speed of light, it becomes infinitely large and infinitely small in size, and according to the history of the universe, only singularities satisfy this requirement.

That's when the whole time and space system of the universe collapsed and everything went back to its original singularity.

At this point, the universe no longer exists and needs to start over. Therefore, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light without causing the destruction of the entire universe.

Traveling through time and space is only in the theoretical stage. If you really want to travel through time and space, it will cause the collapse of time and space system.

Of course, the inability to travel through the speed of light, which scientists believe is not the largest speed in the universe, just the largest known to man, is also hypothetical.

Therefore, it is possible that the wall of light speed is simply not reached by human technology.