The End of the World May Arrive on Long Island

The New York senate race may be less important than commonly believed.

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

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.

Fox News, March 27, 2000

-- Flash (flash@flash.hq), March 28, 2000

Answers

I have to tell you Flash I like your style.

-- ET (bnevile@zebra.net), March 28, 2000.

Thanx, ET!

I was kind of worried about the low volume over the last few days and thought I'd better look for some stuff to "liven things up" a little.

And, I'm always sincerely interested at what you folks here have to say on the various issues.

-- Flash (flash@flash.hq), March 28, 2000.

repeat post

-- dah~dork (repeat@post.com), March 28, 2000.

If anyone's interested, Gregory Benford wrote a novel called Cosm, about experiments at RHIC producing not the end of the universe, but the creation of a couple of whole new ones. Pretty good stuff.

Meanwhile, researchers at CERN have already produced the quark plasma RHIC is being built to look at.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), March 28, 2000.

We'll all go together when we go--as Tom Lehrer said.

-- Mara (MW@aol.com), March 28, 2000.

How bad can it be? I already know what it feels like to be sucked into a black hole at the speed of light. It happens to me everytime I start posting in a controversial thread up here...

-TECH32-

-- TECH32 (TECH32@NOMAIL.CON), March 29, 2000.

I remember hearing about this months ago, but as I understood it, this was supposed to happen in November. I was kind of wondering why we were all still alive. As a Doomer in Extremis I submit to you that this stuff is pure liquid evil. Your mileage may vary.

-- Gia (laureltree7@hotmail.com), March 29, 2000.

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

Urr...got tin foil?

-- kritter (kritter@adelphia.net), March 29, 2000.

Well we will know when it happens or we might not. W@e could be gone in a flash,and I hope not.

-- ET (bneville@zebra.net), March 29, 2000.