To: WSFAlist at keithlynch.net
Date: Sat, 28 Jun 2003 01:22:30 -0400
Subject: [WSFA] fw: one more thing to worry about
From: ronkean at juno.com
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.07/doomsday_pr.html

Chain reactions

The fear that scientists tinkering with the elementary components of
matter might unleash disaster has a rich and distinguished history.
Before the detonation of the first atomic bomb at Trinity Site in 1945,
Robert Oppenheimer worried that the unprecedented heat might spark a
fusion chain reaction in the atmosphere. Physicist Hans Bethe performed
calculations proving the planet wouldn't ignite, and the test went
ahead.

The possibility of runaway chain reactions reemerged when scientists
began deploying advanced particle accelerators, like the Cosmotron built
at Long Island's Brookhaven National Labs in 1952. Some scientists
worried that slamming protons into antiprotons at extremely high
velocities might generate an unnatural subatomic template to which other
particles would bind, collapsing matter into a void, possibly for vast
distances. Panels of earnest researchers met to discuss whether
high-energy physics experiments might crush the planet out of existence.
They decided the risk was insignificant, but their concern was reflected
in Kurt Vonnegut's 1963 novel Cat's Cradle, in which a researcher
inadvertently creates "ice-nine," a template molecule that turns water
into a solid at room temperature. When a bit of the stuff falls into the
sea, all water on Earth quickly solidifies, including the water in
living things.

Martin Rees, who has taken part in panels evaluating the safety of
particle accelerators, has revived the idea that high-energy physics
could accidentally destroy the world. In his new book, Our Final Hour,
Rees worries that power improvements in atom smashers like Brookhaven's
new Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider might make these machines capable of
creating a black hole that would scarf up the globe. Ever more powerful
accelerators, he fears, might create a "strangelet" of ultracompressed
quarks - the smallest known units of matter - that would serve as an
ice-nine for the entire universe, causing all matter to bind to the
strangelet and disappear. Since, fundamentally, matter seems to be made
of very rapidly spinning nothingness, there may be no reason why it
couldn't spontaneously return to nothing.

"The present vacuum could be fragile and unstable," Rees frets in his
book. A particle accelerator might cause a tiny bit of space to undergo
a "phase transition" back to the primordial not-anything condition that
preceded the big bang. Nothingness would expand at the speed of light,
deleting everything in its path. Owing to light speed, not even advanced
aliens would see the mega-destructo wave front coming. In other words, a
careless Brookhaven postdoc chopsticking Chinese takeout might
inadvertently destroy the cosmos.

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