Word: strangelets
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Dates: during 2005-2005
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...physicists out to destroy the world? Richard A. Posner does not impute nefarious motives to researchers conducting high-energy particle collision experiments. But in his latest book, Catastrophe, Posner does suggest that one of these experiments could trigger a “strangelet scenario”—a chain reaction that will condense the entire Earth into a tiny ball just 100 meters in diameter...
RHIC, which generates high-energy subatomic collisions between gold ions, quietly opened for business in 2000. Even RHIC’s sharpest opponents calculate the risk of a world-ending “strangelet scenario” to be very, very small. According to Posner, an upper-bound estimate of the danger of a strangelet disaster is 1 in 500,000 over the 10-year period for which RHIC will be in operation. An alternative estimate from Swiss and Israeli scientists puts the danger at 1 in 500 million. But although the likelihood of a strangelet catastrophe is minimal, should...
Several of Posner’s disaster set-ups feel like they’ve been ripped from the scripts of Hollywood blockbusters (think Armageddon or The Matrix). But his strangelet scenario deserves special consideration here at Harvard because particle accelerators figure prominently in the work of several of the University’s most prominent physicists...
...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...