Question Details
Corbis
Will the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), Long Island, generate a 'strangelet'?
Settled on 02/12/2017 16:48 Settled by Josef Biesenberger
Predictions
Background
You may remember the furor that was ignited during the build-up to the commissioning of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2008 when a few under-qualified soothsayers predicted imminent doom and gloom at the hands of high-energy particle collisions inside the powerful accelerator. Fortunately for life on Earth, their predictions of bizarre chain reactions and deadly micro-black holes were based on hype, and a huge misunderstanding of probability, than scientific reality.
But that’s not to say that the hypothetical risks associated with high-energy physics have not been evaluated by scientists. And now, the vanishingly low risk of death-by-strangelets resurfaced not ahead of the opening of a next-generation particle accelerator, but for a particle collider that has been in operation since 2000.
In an op-ed written for the International Business Times, Eric E. Johnson, Associate Professor of Law at the University of North Dakota, and Michael Baram, Professor Emeritus at Boston University Law School, advocate a new risk assessment before the RHIC is switched back online for its 14th run. Brookhaven engineers have already begun pumping cryogenic liquid helium into the RHIC’s 1,740 superconducting magnets, cooling them to near absolute zero (0 Kelvin or -273 degrees Celsius) in preparation for 22 weeks of collisions that will explore a state of matter not seen in the Universe since the Big Bang, 13.75 billion years ago.
“(The) 22-week gold-gold run will include 3 weeks at low energy to complete beam energy scan, 15 weeks at high energy for detailed studies of plasma, plus time for cool down and warm up of magnets,” said Berndt Mueller, Brookhaven’s Associate Laboratory Director for Nuclear and Particle Physics.
The boosted luminosity of the particle beams and the lower energy collisions will optimize the production of quark-gluon plasma — an obvious boon for physics. But this is exactly what concerns law experts Johnson and Baram.
“Critics have called for serious attention to the possibility that the collider might generate a subatomic object called a ‘strangelet,’ which could, if certain assumptions are correct, start a chain reaction converting everything into ‘strange matter,’” they write. “The process would, according to Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal of the United Kingdom, leave the planet ‘an inert hyperdense sphere about one hundred meters across.’”
http://news.discovery.com/space/could-rhic-strangelets-spawn-doomsday-140213.htm
Comments
What's This!?
-
This is a user submitted question. Players make predictions on what they expect to be the actual outcome.
-
Register for free and get 1,000 KtN$
in virtual cash to start predicting! -
Limited offer: Sign up today and recieve double cash!
Comment on this question: