A proton beam powerful enough to pass through a human head sounds like the kind of thing that should end in seconds. For Soviet physicist Anatoli Bugorski, it became one of the strangest survival stories in the history of particle physics. On July 13, 1978, while working at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Protvino, he accidentally placed his head in the path of the U-70 accelerator's proton beam. The beam went through his head, yet Bugorski lived and eventually returned to scientific work.
The story is often told as if Bugorski simply stuck his head into an accelerator out of curiosity. That is not what happened. He was inspecting malfunctioning equipment, and the safety system failed while the accelerator was operating. The U-70 was no ordinary machine, either. CERN records that the accelerator reached a world-record proton energy of 76 GeV in 1967, making it one of the most powerful machines of its time.
