Word: strangelets
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2005-2005
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
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...
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...