Actually it should be teotwaedki (d=dont). interesting read, but not really worried.

www.foxnews.com/science/032700/rhic.sml

-- boo (boo@home.com), March 28, 2000

Answers

Physicists Dismiss Disaster Scenarios For New Long Island Particle Collider

10:13 a.m. ET (1513 GMT) March 27, 2000 By Matt Crenson

UPTON, N.Y.  When the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider begins operating in May, it will recreate conditions that have not existed since the dawn of the universe.

Jeff Geissler/AP

Could that mean the end of the world?

Last year a British newspaper charged that the new physics experiment on Long Island might somehow generate a black hole that would swallow the planet, or perhaps turn all of creation into some kind of deadly "strange matter."

Given that the collider will hurl particles into one another almost at the speed of light, generating temperatures of a trillion degrees and creating a substance that has not existed for 13 billion years, it is easy to imagine that it might cause some kind of catastrophe.

But a panel of physicists commissioned by the Brookhaven National Laboratory after the article came out in The Sunday Times of London has determined that every imaginable disaster scenario would be impossible  or at least extremely unlikely.

"Our conclusion is that the candidate mechanisms for catastrophe scenarios at RHIC are firmly excluded by existing empirical evidence, compelling theoretical arguments, or both," the panel wrote in their report to Brookhaven director John Marburger.

The black hole idea was easy to dismiss. Although the RHIC collisions will pack an awful lot of energy into a very small space, their total impact is roughly equivalent to a mosquito hitting a screen door. Hardly enough to make a black hole.

Another scenario was at least theoretically possible. Maybe a collision could create strangelets, a new form of matter that would also transform everything in contact with it  at the speed of light.

"This one you can't absolutely say no to," said Brookhaven physicist Tim Hallman.

But in order for RHIC to create world-destroying strangelets, a whole chain of things that physicists consider impossible would have to happen.

First, strangelets would have to be produced at an unbelievably low energy for RHIC to be able to generate them.

Second, they would have to be much more stable than physicists think they are in order to exist long enough to do any damage.

Third, they would have to be negatively charged  in violation of current theory. A positively charged strangelet would immediately be isolated from the rest of the universe by a swarm of negatively charged electrons  and do no harm to anybody.

There's one more disaster scenario. Somehow the massive energy released at RHIC could jar the universe into a lower vacuum energy state.

The vacuum state is sort of the energy level of empty space. It is possible, but unlikely, that the universe is not in the lowest possible vacuum energy state and that RHIC could jostle it to a less energetic level.

"This would trigger a chain reaction which would literally swallow up the whole universe at the speed of light," said Brookhaven physicist Tom Ludlam.

But if that were possible at RHIC, it would have happened already somewhere else. Powerful cosmic rays, generated in deep space by exploding stars and other extremely violent sources, have been smashing into the moon and other celestial objects with at least as much energy as the RHIC collisions for billions of years. So the physics panel concluded that if a resetting of the universe's energy were possible at RHIC, it would have happened somewhere else by now.

In the end, that argument really applies to all the potential RHIC disaster scenarios. Mother Nature has been creating particle collisions more powerful than RHIC's for eons. It's just that until very recently, compared to the age of the universe, people haven't been around to worry about them.

Physicists say the collider will begin operating some time in May, depending on how long it takes to power up the superconducting magnets and fill the machine with gold nuclei. It typically takes months to get a high-energy particle collider operating.

-- (kb8um8@yahoo.com), March 28, 2000.

WOW! Are we playing with Cosmic Roulette or what???

-- Hope (NothingSerious@Happens.com), March 29, 2000.

The "conditions that have not existed since the dawn of the universe" were in fact already created at CERN. Read all about it in the latest Scientific American. Fascinating stuff, if you're a particle physicist. The world didn't end.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), March 29, 2000.

Aren't they doing this for two reasons: 1) to create an energy source for a planet with so many people and 2) to break the speed of light so we can (esentially) fold time and travel faster through space?

I seem to remember Micho Kaku saying something about this.

Cheers!

PS: Anita, if you see this please email me :-)

-- Agent Smith (AgentSmith0110@aol.com), April 04, 2000.