What if you put your hand in a particle accelerator?

Thanks for watching. [VIDEO CONTAINS SOME GRAPHIC IMAGES] We return to our [HALF-LIFE HISTORIES] series with a story you probably haven't heard before. The Hanoi Incident is overshadowed in history by Anatoli Burgoski, but ask yourself a question...why was the fate of the anonymous director in Hanoi so different?

It completely blows my mind that there wasn't something as simple as a conspicuous red light in the room that was lit when the machine was turned on...

“How did you lose your hands?” “Antimatter annihilation.”

"Part of my body was inside an active particle accelerator for an extended amount of time" "Vitamin deficiency"

Honestly the fact that somebody losing their hands is one of the worst particle accelerator incidents in history is pretty good.

Bro got his hands irradiated, went home and they felt weird, and he was like "nah it's not the radiation, probably the arthritis"

Two things 1: this man is incredibly lucky it was only his hands in front of that beam. It’s really terrible it happened at all, but at least the human body can survive without hands. 2: “antimatter annihilation” is the hardest thing I’ve heard all day

7:10 Thankfully the assistant was smart and ran to the control room first and not into the active accelerator room.

I started watching half-life histories a while ago when I was working in a factory. I quit my job and got into a radiation therapy program. Currently I work as a radiation therapist and am halfway through medical dosimetry school. I can't express how much of an impact this channel and your videos have had on me. Great video as always, keep it up!

imagine STICKING YOUR HAND IN A PARTICLE BEAM GOING THE SPEED OF LIGHT, and when your hand feels weird a few hours later, you just think, "Huh! Weird! Must be my arthritis."

11:40 I know not all Uranium is radio active, but the idea of using Uranium to block radiation is still very funny to me.

My dad worked there and that case was famous. His motorbike later transformed to be used with his left hand. My dad was the one who brought by him self the box containing radioactive material from that institute to another one in Dalat by train. There is another case when a scientist fell on stares while bringing a big acid tank with another in the Chemical Institute.

Hands down, the best particle accelerator story I've heard in a while.

My friend had his hand surgically embedded in his abdomen like that after it got caught is the gears of a machine at a plastic factory, I'll never forget going to visit him and seeing that.... He had initially lost all but his pinky and ring finger and that side of his hand but they ended up having to amputate just above his elbow because of complications. He won a lawsuit against the company because the safety sensor on the machine didn't work and then he opened his own landscaping company called Captain Hooks lol.

As an accelerator physicist in Germany, I'm used to interlock systems, radiation bunkers, lead fortresses and the like. To think, that as late as the 1990's there were accelerator facilities with so low radiation protection standards anywhere in the world, is quite shocking to me.

This is superb. I am a radiation worker and have worked with radiation safety systems. This video would be much better training for the workers than what we get! No one knows the work that goes into protection- the shielding calculations and verification, the interlocks and the procedures.

I live in Vietnam, so from what i called, the things with regulations and policies for safety didnt apply much for our people back in the days. Especially back when Vietnam was just gotten out of a huge major war and Economy still try to recover itself. Everything we did was trying our best to getting back on track to live and having a better life, knowing that it would cost us life and many things else. And for us people, we usually joking about our braveness is on the top list since we were use to cutting bomb to sell scrap and gunpowder also. So yeah, long story short, it such an honor living in a country like that but also sometimes scary af 😅

As far as nuclear accidents go, the man was probably lucky. Losing both your hands is not cheap but far better than what has been covered by this channel in the past.

The director's name is Trần Đức Thiệp (you can see his name at 13:22). He was and still is one of Vietnam's leading experts in atomic energy, and he is still healthy and well. He talked briefly about the incident in an interview, stating that (after being discharged from hospital and returning home) he initially struggled in performing daily activities but after a while he adapted to living life normally, even driving his motorbike like nothing had happened. He is a distinguished professor and still very much active in the field of nuclear physics even to this day.

I really like these more seriously narrated videos you do. I can fall asleep to them with how calm your voice is.