-Caveat Lector-
Ready for blastoff: a Brookhaven engineer puts finishing touches to the ion
collider
Big Bang machine could destroy Earth
by Jonathan Leake
Science Editor
A NUCLEAR accelerator designed to replicate the Big Bang is under
investigation by international physicists because of fears that it might
cause "perturbations of the universe" that could destroy the Earth. One
theory even suggests that it could create a black hole.
Brookhaven National Laboratories (BNL), one of the American government's
foremost research bodies, has spent eight years building its Relativistic
Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) on Long Island in New York state. A successful
test-firing was held on Friday and the first nuclear collisions will take
place in the autumn, building up to full power around the time of the
millennium.
Last week, however, John Marburger, Brookhaven's director, set up a
committee of physicists to investigate whether the project could go
disastrously wrong. It followed warnings by other physicists that there was
a tiny but real risk that the machine, the most powerful of its kind in the
world, had the power to create "strangelets" - a new type of matter made up
of sub-atomic particles called "strange quarks".
The committee is to examine the possibility that, once formed, strangelets
might start an uncontrollable chain reaction that could convert anything
they touched into more strange matter. The committee will also consider an
alternative, although less likely, possibility that the colliding particles
could achieve such a high density that they would form a mini black hole. In
space, black holes are believed to generate intense gravitational fields
that suck in all surrounding matter. The creation of one on Earth could be
disastrous.
Professor Bob Jaffe, director of the Centre for Theoretical Physics at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is on the committee, said he
believed the risk was tiny but could not be ruled out. "There have been
fears that strange matter could alter the structure of anything nearby. The
risk is exceedingly small but the probability of something unusual happening
is not zero."
Construction of the �350m RHIC machine started eight years ago and is almost
complete. On Friday scientists sent the first beam of particles around the
machine - but without attempting any collisions.
Inside the collider, atoms of gold will be stripped of their outer electrons
and pumped into one of two 2.4-mile circular tubes where powerful magnets
will accelerate them to 99.9% of the speed of light.
The ions in the two tubes will travel in opposite directions to increase the
power of the collisions. When they smash into each other, at one of several
intersections between the tubes, they will generate minuscule fireballs of
superdense matter with temperatures of about a trillion degrees - 10,000
times hotter than the sun. Such conditions are thought not to have existed -
except possibly in the heart of some dense stars - since the Big Bang that
formed the universe between 12 billion and 15 billion years ago.
Under such conditions atomic nuclei "evaporate" into a plasma of even
smaller particles called quarks and gluons. Theoretical and experimental
evidence predicts that such a plasma would then emit a shower of other,
different particles as it cooled down.
Among the particles predicted to appear during this cooling are strange
quarks. These have been detected in other accelerators but always attached
to other particles. RHIC, the most powerful such machine yet built, has the
ability to create solitary strange quarks for the first time since the
universe began.
BNL confirmed that there had been discussion over the possibility of
"perturbations in the universe". Thomas Ludlam, associate project director
of RHIC, said that the committee would hold its first meeting shortly.
John Nelson, professor of nuclear physics at Birmingham University who is
leading the British scientific team at RHIC, said the chances of an accident
were infinitesimally small - but Brookhaven had a duty to assess them. "The
big question is whether the planet will disappear in the twinkling of an
eye. It is astonishingly unlikely that there is any risk - but I could not
prove it," he said.
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