Word: strangelet
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Dates: during 2005-2005
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Posner takes a midpoint between the two disaster estimates, and he posits—for the sake of argument—that the likelihood of a world-ending strangelet scenario over the next decade is 1 in 10 million. In other words, there’s a 1 in 10 million chance that 6 billion people will die at some point in the next decade because of RHIC. Thus on average, we would expect RHIC to kill 60 people per year. Is that a sacrifice we should be willing to make to push the frontiers of physics forward...
After reading Catastrophe, I spent several sleepless nights worrying about the 600 innocent souls who—in our hypothetical world of risk-benefit analysis—will be swallowed alive by an out-of-control strangelet sometime in the next decade. I was so 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...
...conditions in RHIC could produce a strangelet disaster, physicists argue, then we would probably be dead already...
...benefit analysis is only useful if the risk is non-zero,” Feldman wrote in an e-mail. “But in the strangelet scenario, “the risk is sufficiently close to zero that risk-benefit analysis is not helpful...
...Posner writes, “social control of science cannot be left to the scientists.” In challenging his readers to wade into the arcane debate over strangelet disasters, Posner brings particle physics to the masses. By framing cost-benefit calculations in lucid prose, Posner helps the non-economists among us make decisions in the face of unlikely but potentially earth-shattering risks...