Re: Dangerous Ion Colliding Experiment? (Long - includes press re leases and more)

[Samuel Held <Held@RHIP.PHYS.UTK.EDU>]

This e-mail was broadcast over the general listserve for my experiment,
phenix-news-l.  Here it is:

Dear PHENIX Colleague:

You may be interested in the below message, released by Dr. Marburger
following
the rather bizarre article in the Times of London. The Scientific
American
letter that Dr. Marburger refers to is available at

    http://www.sciam.com/1999/0799issue/0799letters.html

   (Thanks to Peter Steinberg for this reference.)

Best regards,

Bill

> (Sam Held:  This is our spokesman, Bill Zajc, from Columbia
University.)

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 19 Jul 1999 16:07:17 -0400
From: BNL Media & Communications <pubaf@bnl.gov>
To: BNL Labwide Broadcasts <broadcast-l@bnl.gov>
Subject: Theoretical RHIC Risks

The following statement was issued today by Brookhaven National
Laboratory
in response to an article on RHIC published in yesterday's Sunday Times
of
London. Please share it with others in your area who do not have access
to
e-mail.
***

Statement by John Marburger, Brookhaven Lab Director, On Consequences of
RHIC Operations
July 19, 1999

Yesterday, the Sunday Times of London published a story under the
headline
"Big Bang Machine could destroy the Earth," with an accompanying
editorial.
The story has its origins in a letter in the July 1999 issue of
Scientific
American magazine, in which a prominent physicist describes a possible
scenario in which an exotic elementary particle transforms its
surroundings.

I am familiar with the issue of possible dire consequences of
experiments
at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, which Brookhaven Lab is now
commissioning.  These issues have been raised and examined by
responsible
scientists who have concluded that there is no chance that any
phenomenon
produced by RHIC will lead to disaster.

The amount of matter involved in the RHIC collisions is exceedingly
small -
only a single pair of nuclei is involved in each collision.  Our
universe
would have to be extremely unstable in order for such a small amount of
energy to cause a large effect.  On the contrary, the universe appears
to
be quite stable against releases of much larger amounts of energy that
occur in astrophysical processes.

RHIC collisions will be within the spectrum of energies encompassed by
naturally occurring cosmic radiation.  The earth and its companion
objects
in our solar system have survived billions of years of cosmic ray
collisions with no evidence of the instabilities that have been the
subject
of speculation in connection with RHIC.

I have asked experts in the relevant fields of physics to reduce to a
single comprehensive report the arguments that address the safety of
each
of the speculative "disaster scenarios."  I expect the report to be
completed well before RHIC produces the high-energy collisions necessary
for any of these scenarios.  When the report is completed, it will be
broadly published and placed on the Laboratory's web site.


**************************************
BNL Media & Communications
pubaf@bnl.gov
516-344-3174 or 2345 * Fax 516-344-3368
Brookhaven National Laboratory
Bldg. 134 PO Box 5000
Upton NY 11973
www.bnl.gov

**************************************

************************************************************************

Here is a reponse to a letter from someone who believed the London Daily
News article.  Another article about the Scientific American Letters
(July 99) in reference to the April(?) 99 article, which I thought was
good, can be found at
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/07/18/1415231.  Slashdot is an
interesting site covering "News for nerds, stuff that matters".  They
have articles on Linux, encryption, science, and just about anything
else.  Anyway, they got their info from the London Daily News, I
believe.


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 23 Jul 1999 11:12:56 -0400
From: BNL Media & Communications <pubaf@bnl.gov>
To: mparks@jps.net
Subject: RHIC concerns

Michael,

Dr. Franz forwarded me your two e-mails, and I'd like to give you a
little
more information.

We certainly do not wish to destroy the Earth (or anything else, for
that
matter). This subject has come up before. Scientists around the world
have
thought about it and analyzed it. They and we are quite sure it could
never
happen.

A couple more things:

1. We are not trying to "recreate" the Big Bang. What we are trying to
do
is see (on a sub-atomic scale) what matter might have been like just
after
the birth of our universe. To do that, we need to collide gold particles
at
relatively high energies. Similar collisions (at even higher energies)
occur regularly when cosmic rays interact with our atmosphere, without
any
catastrophic consequences.

2. The particles released by a collision are not "charged with the
energy
equivalent to 10,000 or so of our suns." At the collision point, again
on a
sub-atomic level, temperatures equivalant to 10,000 times the surface
temperature of the sun are generated for a fraction of a second. If you
were looking at the collision point during a collision you wouldn't even
be
able to see anything. We will be colliding sub-atomic particles.

I understand you already have the statement from our director, but
here's a
story from yesterday's Newsday, a New York daily newspaper, on the
Sunday
Times article, as well as the question and response from the July
Scientific American that led to the London Sunday Times article. The
Newsday piece in particular does a very good job of explaining the
issues.
I hope it addresses any concerns you may have.

Thanks,

Pete Genzer
Media and Communications Group
Brookhaven National Laboratory


NEWSDAY

Story Is Out of This World
By Earl Lane   Washington Bureau

Washington -- Brookhaven National Laboratory officials knew things were
getting out of hand on Monday when they got a call from a reporter for
an
online news service asking - apparently not in jest - whether the lab's
new
ion collider could have created a black hole that swallowed the plane of
John F. Kennedy Jr. as it flew past Long Island.
    Physicists long have been accustomed to reassuring anxious residents
that their latest research machines are not going to destroy the world.
     But frustrated Brookhaven lab officials are prepared for a new
flurry
of attention in the wake of a piece over the weekend in The Sunday Times
of
London suggesting the lab's new Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider could
create some sort of runaway, catastrophic reaction involving
hypothetical
particles called ''strangelets.''
     The Times' understated headline: ''Big Bang Machine Could Destroy
Earth.''
     The problem, according to physicists at Brookhaven and elsewhere,
is
that the possibilities discussed in the Times piece - which is now being
circulated widely on the Internet - have been examined and dismissed by
specialists as not plausible.
    Robert Jaffe, director of the Center for Theoretical Physics at
Massachusetts Institute Technology in Cambridge, Mass. and a developer
of
strangelet theory, said the chances a stable strangelet could even be
produced in the Brookhaven collider ''are about the same order [of
possibility] as if I were to win the lottery.''
    In turn, the notion that such a particle would pose any catastrophic
risk to the planet is ''preposterous,'' Jaffe said. It is ''unlikely to
the
level of the most absurd thing you could imagine,'' he said. ''It's more
likely that a spaceship is going to land in the middle of Texas, and
that
aliens are going to come out and tell us that the New York Yankees are
all
aliens.''
     The Sunday Times said Brookhaven director John Marburger had set up
a
committee of physicists last week ''to investigate whether the project
could go disastrously wrong.'' But Marburger says that he had decided
several weeks ago to ask a few leading physicists to write a ''white
paper'' about the proposed science at the new ion collider and why some
of
the wilder speculation about what could happen in the machine was not
credible.
    There had been a letter recently to Scientific American magazine,
for
example, asking whether the Brookhaven machine could, in theory, create
a
mini black hole - a superdense region of gravitational collapse where
even
light waves cannot escape.
    Such questions arise because the collider - which circulated its
first
beam of ions on Friday - is meant to briefly re-create, on a very small
scale, conditions similar to the superdense state of matter believed to
have existed just after the Big Bang. Jaffe said the collision energies
to
be created in the Brookhaven machine,   however, are vastly less - by
about
17 orders of magnitude - than those associated with any gravitational
effects in quantum physics.
    As for strangelets, those hypothetical particles would be a rare
form
of nuclear matter composed of building blocks called ''strange'' quarks.
Normal matter, such as protons and neutrons, are made of ''up'' and
''down'' quarks. Some theorists believe strangelets may exist, under
extreme pressure, at the cores of neutron stars.
    All searches for hints of them elsewhere, including in normal
environments on Earth or in previous particle accelerator experiments,
have
proved fruitless, Jaffe said. And even if a strangelet did exist, he
argues, it would not cannibalize normal matter in its neighborhood
because
the atoms in that matter would be protected by their surrounding swarm
of
electrons.
    Frank Wilczek, a theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton, N.J., responding to a letter in Scientific American, wrote
that
strangelets ''if they exist, at all, are not aggressive, and they will
start out very, very small.'' For strangelets, as with mini black holes,
he
says, ''a doomsday scenario is not plausible.''
    Marburger, a physicist, and other specialists say the most
convincing
argument against a strangelet catastrophe is empirical. For billions of
years, cosmic rays - which penetrate our atmosphere constantly - have
been
producing energetic events comparable to those envisioned in the
Brookhaven
machine. No strangelets have formed and proceeded to gobble up our
world.
    ''The best evidence that it can't happen is that it hasn't
happened,''
said Willam Zajc, a Columbia University physicist.
    ''The idea that scares people is that you are creating an
environment
[in the collider] that never before has been created,'' MIT's Jaffe
said.
''The answer is it has been created a lot of times before in cosmic
rays.''
    Scott Cullen, legal coordinator for Standing for Truth About
Radiation,
an activist group that's been critical of the laboratory's environmental
record, said he was surpised when he first read The Sunday Times piece.
    ''I wondered if it was some kind of hoax, really,'' Cullen said. But
he
said local residents have been calling with questions and concerns about
it
so community activists will seek a meeting with Brookhaven officials
''to
learn more about this.''
    Brookhaven's recent difficulties on the environmental front have
fostered a sense of distrust and suspicion among residents, Cullen said,
and many are unwilling to discount anything they read about the lab.
***

JULY 1999 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN LETTERS

Madhusree Mukerjee's article on the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider
(RHIC)
at Brookhaven National Laboratory ["A Little Big Bang," March] alarmed
several readers, such as Michael Cogill of Coquitlam, B.C. "I am
concerned
that physicists are boldly going where it may be unsafe to go," writes
Cogill, who worries that creating stuff that has not to anyone's
knowledge
existed since the early universe - namely, a quark-gluon plasma -  could
result in a catastrophe. "What if they somehow alter the underlying
nature
of things such that it cannot be restored?" he asks. Another reader
wondered whether the RHIC experiments could result in miniature black
holes
(below).

BLACK HOLES AT BROOKHAVEN?

Thank you for the article by Madhusree Mukerjee entitled "A Little Big
Bang" [March]. In the 1970s Stephen W. Hawking postulated that in the
early
moments of the big bang, miniature black holes would have been present.
Although they no longer exist in our region of the universe, such mini
black holes could be created by smashing a proton into an antiproton
with
enough energy. If one were created near a large congregation of mass and
if
it started absorbing that mass before exploding, the black hole could
reach
a relatively stable half-life and thus continue to grow. If this
happened
on the earth, the mini black hole would be drawn by gravity toward the
center of the planet, absorbing matter along the way and devouring the
entire planet within minutes.
 My calculations indicate that the Brookhaven collider does not obtain
sufficient energies to produce a mini black hole; however, my
calculations
might be wrong. The only way to determine the energy density at which a
mini black hole would be created as an intermediary step to the type of
explosion depicted in your article is to build a collider and do the
experiment. Is the Brookhaven collider for certain below the threshold?

WALTER L. WAGNER
 via e-mail

Frank Wilczek of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J.,
rep=
lies:

Whenever we explore new physical (or chemical, or biological) phenomena,
questions like Cogill's arise regarding whether we might unwittingly
trigger some catastrophe. For example, in the early days of the
Manhattan
Project, Fermi and others carefully considered whether a nuclear
explosion
might ignite the atmosphere. Scientists must take such possibilities
very
seriously--even if the risks seem remote--because an error might have
devastating consequences.

In the case of the Brookhaven RHIC, dangerous surprises seem extremely
unlikely. First, nuclear collisions with larger energies take place
regularly as cosmic rays rain down on our atmosphere so if a disaster
were
possible, it would have already occurred. Second, related regimes have
been
explored in detail, and so we have substantial evidence that our
theoretical framework for understanding what will happen is reliable.
Although we cannot calculate the consequences in complete detail, we can
distinguish credible from incredible scenarios.

 The idea that mini black holes will be formed, as Wagner suggests,
definitely falls in the latter category. The energy densities and
volumes
that will be produced at RHIC are nowhere near large enough to produce
strong gravitational fields. On the other hand, there is a speculative
but
quite respectable possibility that subatomic chunks of a new stable form
of
matter called strangelets might be produced (this would be an
extraordinary
discovery). One might be concerned about an "ice-9"-type transition,
wherein a strangelet grows by incorporating and transforming the
ordinary
matter in its surroundings. But strangelets, if they exist at all, are
not
aggressive, and they will start out very, very small. So here again a
doomsday scenario is not plausible.

> > From mparks@jps.net Thu Jul 22 15:47:56 1999
> Date: Thu, 22 Jul 99 12:35:09 +700
> From: mparks@jps.net
> To: Achim@smtp6.jps.net, Franz@smtp6.jps.net, Achim@bnl.gov
> Subject: Statement?
>
> Thank you Dr. Franz, for the information.  It would appear that BNL, at
this
> point, still cannot rule out a "strangelet chain reaction" as a
possible
> result of this kind of testing.
>
> In fact, while the 2nd paragraph of the statement indicates that there
is no
> chance of any disastrous results... in the 5th paragraph, John
Marburger
> indicates
> he's instructed "experts in the field of physics" to file reports on
the "the
> arguments that address the safety of each of the speculative 'disaster
> scenarios'
> ". Why? Wouldn't you agree that this is a confusing statement? And that
it
> would
> seem to contradict the "calming" effect the 2nd paragraph is meant to
deliver?
> Do any of you know what the "worst case scenario" really is? I've gone
through
> the '92 description of what RHIC research will do.. and quark matter
plasma
> is one of the results anticipated.  Creating collision events that
interact
> or cause interaction on the sub-atomic level seems dangerous to me (and
to at
> least one physisist). Trying to simulate the Big Bang in a test tube (a
big
> one) seems like trying to contain a firecracker's explosion inside of a
house
> of cards.
>
> And lastly, John Marburger horribly downplayed the incredible energy
> production of the proposed experiments. Sure, a single pair of nuclei
in each
> collision..
> sounds almost "quaint". But with the resulting release of hundreds of
> particles
> charged with the energy equivelent to 10,000 or so of our suns! And
> unpredictable
> quantum features of the events.
>
> Dr Franz, I apologize for throwing this at you. But if there is any
chance
> myself,
> my wife, my 7 year old son, and my 9 month old baby son, and the rest
of
> mankind
> could perish because you physicists are searching for some new level of
> science
> - then you must get used to hearing from the people you might just end
up
> killing.
>
>
> Extreme? Think about your family... not as a driven scientist, but as a
man.
> I don't care how many combined years of schooling and knowledge the BNL
staff
> have - YOU DON'T HAVE THE RIGHT TO PLAY GOD WITH THE EARTH. Tone it
down.
> Don't destroy humanity with toys that have the ability to tear apart
the fabric of
> our existence. Error on the side of CAUTION, for God's sake.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Michael Parks

************************************************************************
********************



For any further information, you certainly get some from:

**************************************
BNL Media & Communications
pubaf@bnl.gov
516-344-3174 or 2345 * Fax 516-344-3368
Brookhaven National Laboratory
Bldg. 134 PO Box 5000
Upton NY 11973
www.bnl.gov

***************************************


For more info on particle physics and our high energy nuclear physics
work:
http://pdg.lbl.gov
http://www-spires.slac.stanford.edu/FIND/explist.html (List of current
particle physics experiments)
http://www.rhic.bnl.gov
http://www.fermilab.gov
http://www.cern.ch


Hope that helps even more.


Sam "Have I killed this subject to death?" Held