A Russian physicist got a proton beam to the head and is still alive (with some damage) despite getting like 300 times the lethal dose of radiation. It was localized to his skull rather than full-body, admittedly, and that'll reduce things but one would think your brain wouldn't be able to handle that. That was at 70GeV, the LHC is up to 6.8TeV (~100x the energy), and the particle you mentioned was 320EeV (~50 million x the energy), so who knows?

On another note, I'm like 90% sure that the LHC is shooting a particle beam made up of shitloads of particles, so you're not really going to be able to just shoot a single proton or whatever at somebody.

[–] keepcarrot@hexbear.net 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Perhaps we should go the other way. Instead of spreading the impact out to the entire body, concentrate it into a bullet sized beam through some vital part (the posting lobe?)

[–] barrbaric@hexbear.net 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

It's already pretty concentrated. From what I can tell, particle beams are a few millimeters in diameter at most; the LHC is apparently 16 microns at the point of collision. It's more that the amount of actual power being dumped into the skull is extremely small. The unit eV stands for "electron volt" and is equal to the energy gained by a single electron being accelerated by 1 volt, which is about 1.6x10^-19^ Joules. Add on that an electron has very little mass, and you're not exactly going to have much stopping power.

[–] NuraShiny@hexbear.net 5 points 2 days ago

I am willing to compromise on the s9ingle particle bit of this idea. Let's put them in the beam path for a minute while shaking them vigorously using some of those car building robot arms.

[–] keepcarrot@hexbear.net 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Ah, I thought it was being spread out over the entire skull

[–] barrbaric@hexbear.net 6 points 2 days ago

Per the wikipedia article on the guy who got hit:

On 13 July 1978, he was checking a malfunctioning piece of equipment when the safety mechanisms failed. Bugorski was leaning over the equipment when he stuck his head in the path of the 76 GeV proton beam. He reportedly saw a flash "brighter than a thousand suns" but did not feel any pain.[1] The beam passed through the back of his head, the occipital and temporal lobes of his brain, the left middle ear, and out through the left-hand side of his nose. The exposed parts of his head received a local dose of 200,000 to 300,000 roentgens (2,000 to 3,000 Sieverts).