Word: posnerã
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...furious that I started rounding up fellow socially-minded Harvardians to head to RHIC’s Upton, N.Y. home and protest this travesty. In a fearful fury, I decided to check with Harvard’s crack team of experimental high energy physicists to see whether Posner??s calculations are on-target...
...Posner??s credit, Catastrophe does anticipate Gabrielse’s counter-argument. Posner writes that “a cosmic ray hitting a fixed target such as the moon will tend to scatter the nuclei that it hits, making it less likely that they will clump”—and thus produce strange matter—“than if the collision were head on,” as it would be inside RHIC. So, the fact that the moon has existed for 4.5 billion years without condensing into a tiny ball does not necessarily...
...Harvard physicists’ rejection of Posner??s calculation suggests the risk of catastrophe posed by RHIC might fall within a margin that most of us would be willing to tolerate...
Second—and this is perhaps Posner??s most perplexing point—we tend to value our lives less as the risk of mortality grows more remote...
Princeton philosopher Peter Singer argued in a recent New York Times review that Posner??s argument on this point is “bizarre.” But upon closer examination, it seems rather intuitive...