The man who put his head in a particle accelerator

The U-70 synchrotron control room.

On July 13 1978 Anatoli Bugorski, a physicist working on the U-70 synchrotron at the Institute of High Energy Physics in Protvino, Russia decided to put his head into the particle accelerator whilst it was running. Presumably he did not know it was running at the time, and presumably there were some safety features that should have prevented him from doing so but which had failed.

Nonetheless, Bugorski somehow managed to put his head into a beam of 76 GeV protons (for comparison, the LHC accelerates protons to an energy of 3500 GeV).

The beam caused a flash in Bugorski’s eyes “brighter than a thousand suns” and the left side of his face swelled up beyond recognition. He was later taken to a state hospital that specialised in treating radiation injuries where it was expected he would die. Amazingly, despite the huge dose of radiation, Bugorski survived; probably due to the fact that the radiation was confined to a very small area.

A photograph of Bugorski taken for Pravda in 1998.

With the left side of his face paralysed, with no hearing in his left ear and suffering from seizures, Bugorski still managed to complete his PhD and became the coordinator of experiments at the U-70 accelerator.

(I’d like to point out that the original title of this post was going to be In Soviet Russia, Particles Accelerate You [source] but I resisted.)


Does time go faster as you get older?

Whilst two observers moving relative to each other will experience the other’s time as moving slower or faster (Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity), the passage of time for any given observer in a single reference frame is constant.

But as you get older, time seems to go faster. This is because each subsequent day is a smaller fraction of your lifetime up to that point: for a one year-old baby, one day represents 0.274% of their lifetime; but for an eighty year-old adult one day is a mere 0.00343%.

The progression is easier to see on a logarithmic scale:

Unclaimed Antarctica

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Officially, Antarctica is not ruled by anybody; the entire continent is terra nullius: land that belongs to noone. After the Moon, it is the largest terra nullius area that men have walked on.

Seven countries (the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia, France, Norway, Chile and Argentina) have claimed sections of Antarctica, but those claims are not universally recognised, and in some cases overlap.

L-R: The Australian and New Zealander claims. Both were previously part of the UK’s claim.

L-R: The overlapping Argentinian and Chilean claims.

L-R: The Norwegian and French claims.

The United Kingdom’s claim. Note the overlap with the Argentinian and Chilean claims.

When all the existing claims are taken into account that still leaves a small area adjacent to the Norwegian claim, and the entire area between 90°W and 150°W (1.6 million square kilometres, three times the size of France) unclaimed by anyone.

Under the terms of the Antarctic Treaty Peru, South Africa, the USA and Russia have formally reserved the right to make a claim to land in Antarctica, but have yet failed to do so.