PARTICLE COLLIDER: One of the worlds largest particle colliders is about to undergo upgrades that will make it considerably more powerful than it is now. The ensuing experiments will once again take us into uncharted scientific waters, prompting critics to warn of a potential catastrophe — one powerful enough to destroy our entire planet. The worlds second most powerful particle accelerator, Brookhaven National Laboratorys Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), is about to enter into its 15th year of service (the most powerful collider being the Large Hadron Collider [LHC] in Europe). The anticipated upgrades will increase the RHICs ability to produce particle collisions by a factor of 20 over the original design, while operating at a luminosity 18 times greater than before. RELATED A New Record for the Highest Temperature Weve Ever Created: A Whopping 4 Trillion Degrees Celsius Guinness World Records has recognized Brookhaven National Laboratorys Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider as the device which has set a new… Read… Trouble is, none of this was considered during the initial risk assessment. And as pointed out by a duo of concerned legal experts in an International Business Times OpEd, the state of knowledge in nuclear physics has advanced considerably since then. Indeed, in addition to confirmation of the Higgs boson, scientists have discovered quark-gluon plasma — a liquid-like substance with a temperature exceeding 4 trillion K. Its unlike any kind of normal matter we know of, one that recreates the conditions that existed during the first seconds of the universe. According to Eric E. Johnson, Associate Professor of Law at the University of North Dakota, and Michael Baram, Professor Emeritus at Boston University Law School, it would subsequently be a good idea to re-evaluate the potential for the RHIC to unleash an existential-scale disaster on Earth. They argue that the recently established blue-ribbon commission to evaluate the cost effectiveness of the U.S. Department of Energys national labs should take a sober look at one experimental program that raises a bizarre and little-discussed prospect of destroying the entire planet. Their concern? The formation of micro black holes and small fragments of strange matter called, appropriately enough, strangelets. Strangelets and Micro Black Holes RELATED The Astronomer Royal tells io9 how he plans to save humanity from extinction Back in 2003, the preeminent physicist and cosmologist Sir Martin Rees created a considerable stir with the publication of his book, Our Final Hour,… Read… Critics are worried that the souped-up collider could produce strangelets — a subatomic object (a hypothetical form of quark matter that contains roughly equal number of up, down, and strange quarks more stable than ordinary nuclei) that could, under the right conditions, start a chain reaction in a runaway fusion process that would convert everything into strange matter. In the words of Sir Martin Rees, it would leave the planet an inert hyperdense sphere about one hundred metres across. Johnson and Baram are concerned that some proposed low energy experiments at the LHIC could actually increase the risk of creating strangelets. As noted by Lisa Lyga in Phys.org:
Posted on: Thu, 24 Apr 2014 08:17:00 +0000