What happens when you stick your head in a particle accelerator!?

[dugnsuz]

...well today I found out!
http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2010/03/what-happens-when-you-stick-your-head-into-a-particle-accelerator/

[multiweb]

"Despite the beam going through his brain, his intellectual capacity remained the same as before."

... :rolleyes: :P

[CraigS]

Then it goes on to say he had seizures, paralysis, loss of hearing, mental fatigue …

Cheers

[multiweb]

I think he had the symptoms before he decided to stick his head in it. :nerd:

[CraigS]

I think the fatigue may have been just a 'Relative' thing, though .. :P

… after all, it must've been an accelerating experience .. :P

:)

(Lets stop .. before this gets out of control .. :lol: :) )

Cheers

[CometGuy]

omg..definite candidate for failblog! :eyepop:

[mental4astro]

The following has nothing to do with particle accelerators, but it's in the same vein...

At the Tafe course I did some 20 years ago, we had some robust furnaces going at around 850 deg C. After being used for the lesson it was lunch time, so the teacher thought-

"Hey, why not use the residual heat in the furnace to warm up my pizza slices for lunch?!"

At 850 deg. a slice of pizza becomes a bomb of fat and water vapour, doesn't it!!!!

BOOOM! and $1500 later to repair the furnace. ;) Clever lad...

[cfranks]

A friend in High School (60 years ago!) didn't believe that Hydrogen Sulfide H2S was poisonous. He started the gas generating in a fume cabinet, stuck his head in and lowered the door down. Fortunately, when he lost consciousness he slipped out under the door and we found him on the floor. He recovered OK but left the school not long after!

Charles

[GeoffW1]

:eyepop:

:eyepop: He was very very lucky

[CraigS]

I had a chemistry teacher who had a hammer blown out of his hand, whilst demonstrating to the class what happens when you 'bash' potassium chlorate together with sulphur!

I reckon Mark, (marki), would have a few stories to tell about this sort of stuff.
:)
Cheers

[avandonk]

As someone who has been to a few particle accellerators you would have to know how to disable the safety interlocks to irradiate yourself.
I do not know the circumstances in this case but I am sure he was breaking every safety rule in the book.

There are innocents that cop the same fate.
There was a case of the Japanese Nuclear Industry sequentially hiring unemployed homeless people to mix Uranium 235 salts with minimal protection. The recipe was to mix small quantities of Uranium Hexafluoride into a solvent. These blokes thought the recipe was a waste of time so they did the whole lot at once. The mixture went critical and the room was a bright blue with Cherenkov Radiation. A sure sign of massive nuclear fission reactions. All these workers died of radiation exposure.
There was a big cover up but it still came out.

Bert

[mental4astro]

I've got another one! I've got another one!

A bloke that should have known much, much better as a plumber for close to 50 years, he's fixing the gas outlet to our stove in the kitchen. Being really, really confident about his workmanship, the bugger tests the seal for leaks with HIS LIGHTER!

BOOOOM!

No eyebrows, no eyelashes and a new haircut! And a lot of swearing in Greek that would have made a sailor blush! :rofl: :ashamed:

[Steffen]

This story sounds fishy. Aren't particle accelerators almost perfectly evacuated? If he'd stuck his head in there (assuming that was possible) it would have exploded.

Cheers
Steffen.

[avandonk]

He could only irradiate himself with a 'beam' coming out of a 'window' that separates the vacuum from the outside.

Bert

[AstralTraveller]

OK you started me. Although the exact location has been lost I'm assured the basics of this are true. There was a factory which had a lab attached (presumably for quality control tests). In the lab was a gas chromatograph which was set up each day to do an overnight autorun (GC samples take from perhaps 30minutes to >1hr each to run). During each run the oven temperature is ramped from near ambient temperature to 200-300 degrees.

The problem was that for a short time each night the results (chromatograms) exhibited a noisy baseline and the elution time of the various compounds shifted. It worked fine all day and for the rest of the night. So specialist instrument technicians were called in. After exhaustive testing they could find no problems. So they set up a web cam to record exactly what happened during the night. What did they find? A worker from the factory doing night shift sneaked into the lab with his meal, opened the door to the GC oven and slipped his meal in to warm up! So of course the oven temperature was not what it should have been thus changing elution times and the sudden change of temperature upset the detector (FID? TCD?) and so produced a noisy baseline. No permanent damage done but a lot of time and money wasted. I think management should have put a microwave in the lunch room.

[CraigS]

… and put the factory worker into the GC oven overnight to get the results ..
:P :)

Cheers

[gary]

Hi Doug,

I had been aware of this story before, but thanks for the link as it provided
more information than I had previously known.

It brings to mind the stories of Louis Slotin and Harry K Daghlian.
Both had worked on the Manhattan Project. A young Canadian physicist, Slotin
had been performing dangerous work to determine the criticality
of uranium and plutonium, in experiments that Richard Feynmann referred
to as "tickling the dragon's tail".

Slotin had assembled the Trinity device and after the war in 1946, he was performing
a criticality experiment involving two beryllium half-spheres and a spherical
plutonium core. See picture here -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tickling_the_Dragons_Tail.jpg

A screwdriver slipped and one of the beryllium neutron reflectors slipped causing the
two halves to come together. The room began to glow and others in the room
felt the heat as the plutonium began to go critical. Despite the burning, Slotin
pulled the top beryllium sphere off with his hands and stopped the reaction.
He then went about recording the positions of his co-workers in the room
to help determine their radiation dose. Slotin died nine days later.

The same core had been involved in another fatal accident only eight months
earlier when Harry K. Daghlian accidentally dropped a tungsten carbide brick
onto it during an experiment. The bricks were being used as neutron deflectors
to try and determine how small a core could be to still reach criticality.
Since the pile was about to go supercritical, Daghlian pulled it apart with
his bare hands in order to further expose the core. He died 25 days later.

A story on Slotin appears here on Wikipedia -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin
and a story on Daghlian here -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_K._Daghlian,_Jr.

[CraigS]

Gee Gary;

That's a sad one .. Daghlian was only 24 yrs old when he died, and Slotin was only 35 yrs.

Nasty way to go, too.

I notice they named an Asteroid in Slotin's honour in 2002.

Very sad.

[kustard]

Yeouch! (to all those stories...)

The only one I can add was when I was at TAFE doing my engineering diploma there were some guys in the car park in the rain using their cigarette lighter to see why the carburetor of their hotted up Torana was blocked while another guy was furiously pumping the gas pedal.... I got out of there pretty quickly!

*lame story I know, but it's the best I got hehe*

[CraigS]

Following on from Gary's post, I notice (from Wiki) that a "Nuclear Radiation accident":

.. and that the total number of accidents, fatal and otherwise, is in dispute.

It would appear that most accidents may happen in the USA.

Hmm .. controversial.

Cheers

[Barrykgerdes]

We were never greedy with the H2S. We made sure it was shared with everyone.

Barry

[gary]

Hi Craig,

Terribly young. Many of the Manhattan Project scientists were either students
of Oppenheimer's out of Berkeley or fresh from the University of Chicago where
Enrico Fermi had built the first reactor under the stadium at Stagg Field.
Their average age was somewhere around 29. In 1945, Oppenheimer himself was
only 41.

But then when one reflects that the average age of a B-17 crew member
during that same era had been somewhere around 20, it is a poignant reminder
of how different those times were compared to what we enjoy here today.

As another link with the Slotin story, recently Jen kindly made a post pointing
out the 1968 short documentary "Powers of Ten" which is available these days on YouTube.
See http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/showthread.php?t=71557&highlight=Powers+Ten

Really worth watching for those who did not see it.

I pointed out in a follow-up post (http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/showpost.php?p=685089&postcount=14) that the narrator in that documentary was none other than a
gentleman by the name of Philip Morrision, who had also worked on the Manhattan Project.
Morrison, who was only 30 years old at the time, was a very close friend of Slotin and
did much of the calculations after the accident to determine the
doses of radiation. He then stayed by Slotin's bedside in Los Alamos hospital
and watched his friend die.

To make one final segue, this time to astronomy, in 1959 Morrison co-wrote a seminal paper
which appeared in Nature entitled "Searching for Interstellar Communications",
This short paper is regarded as the beginning of the SETI program.
Though the reproduction is not the best, interested readers can find a scanned
copy of that original Nature article here - http://www.coseti.org/morris_0.htm
An article about the paper appears on the Planetary Society web site here -
http://www.planetary.org/explore/topics/seti/seti_history_02.html

Powerful minds indeed.

[CraigS]

Yes Gary;

Gifted by genetics;

Skilled through education;

Concealed during their research;

Killed by their passions;

Revered by history.

Leadership often manifests itself in mysterious ways, eh ?

Cheers

[jenchris]

You end up like SASUP and want to put a turbo in a Jazz......

[GeoffW1]

:lol: You could nominate him for a Darwin Award

http://www.darwinawards.com/

There's some tragi-comic stories in there

Cheers

[Analog6]

Your particles get accelerated?

I don't think I'll do it anytime soon.