A while back I wa reading an article in New Scientist magazine (Lights Fantastic, Stuart Clark, New Scientist. 31 May, 2008 ) about how astronauts see these inexplicable flashes of light while they’re in space, and the theory is that the ‘flash’ is a side-effect of high-energy particles travelling at very high speeds through the eyeball. (Yes, it’s disturbing, and the process the theory details is more complicated than that, but I don’t want to go into it.)

Anyway, what got me was the experiment Peter McNulty (a professor at Clarkson College of Technology in New York at the time) devised to test this theory: students operated a particle accelerator at Princeton University while their professors placed their heads in front of the beam of muons from the accelerator and described what they saw.

“Princeton made it a condition of the experiment that we would not use graduate students as targets,” McNulty explains,  which is why their professor were used as target instead.

This seems fairly lacking in self-preservation, but McNulty goes even further in the ‘what can I do to myself in the name of science?’ stakes – as his experiment appeared to rule out the possibility that direct stimulation of the visual cortex was causing the flashes, he then, the article notes, deadpan, “tried irradiating other parts of his brain, including the visual cortex, but saw nothing.”

I have every respect for someone with such a strong sense of scientific exploration. Without people doing things like this throughout history, we wouldn’t have a lot of the knowledge we now do. I can’t help thinking, however, that it’s rather risky, and most people would consider doing these things rather too dangerous to try.