Could Experiment Trigger Doomsday?
When the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider begins operating in May, it will re-create conditions that have not existed since the dawn of the universe.
Could that mean the end of the world?
Last year a British newspaper charged that the new physics experiment on Long Island might somehow generate a black hole that would swallow the planet, or perhaps turn all of creation into some kind of deadly “strange matter.”
Given that the collider will hurl particles into one another almost at the speed of light, generating temperatures of a trillion degrees and creating a substance that has not existed for 13 billion years, it is easy to imagine that it might cause some kind of catastrophe.
But a panel of physicists commissioned by the Brookhaven National Laboratory after the article came out in the Sunday Times of London has determined that every imaginable disaster scenario would be impossible--or at least extremely unlikely.
“Our conclusion is that the candidate mechanisms for catastrophe scenarios at RHIC are firmly excluded by existing empirical evidence, compelling theoretical arguments or both,” the panel wrote in their report to Brookhaven Director John Marburger.
The black hole idea was easy to dismiss. Although the RHIC collisions will pack an awful lot of energy into a very small space, their total impact is about equivalent to a mosquito hitting a screen door. Hardly enough to make a black hole.
Another scenario was at least theoretically possible. Maybe a collision could create strangelets, a new form of matter that also would transform everything in contact with it--at the speed of light.
“This one you can’t absolutely say no to,” said Brookhaven physicist Tim Hallman.
But for RHIC to create world-destroying strangelets, a whole chain of things that physicists consider impossible would have to happen.
First, strangelets would have to be produced at an unbelievably low energy for RHIC to be able to generate them.
Second, they would have to be much more stable than physicists think they are to exist long enough to do any damage.
Third, they would have to be negatively charged--in violation of current theory. A positively charged strangelet would immediately be isolated from the rest of the universe by a swarm of negatively charged electrons--and do no harm to anybody.
There’s one more disaster scenario. Somehow the massive energy released at RHIC could jar the universe into a lower vacuum energy state.
The vacuum state is sort of the energy level of empty space. It is possible, but unlikely, that the universe is not in the lowest possible vacuum energy state and that RHIC could jostle it to a less energetic level.
“This would trigger a chain reaction which would literally swallow up the whole universe at the speed of light,” said Brookhaven physicist Tom Ludlam.
But if that were possible at RHIC, it would have happened already somewhere else. Powerful cosmic rays, generated in deep space by exploding stars and other extremely violent sources, have been smashing into the moon and other celestial objects with at least as much energy as the RHIC collisions for billions of years. So the physics panel concluded that if a resetting of the universe’s energy were possible at RHIC, it would have happened somewhere else by now.
In the end, that argument really applies to all the potential RHIC disaster scenarios. Mother Nature has been creating particle collisions more powerful than RHIC’s for eons. It’s just that until very recently, compared to the age of the universe, people haven’t been around to worry about them.
Physicists say the collider will begin operating sometime in May, depending on how long it takes to power up the superconducting magnets and fill the machine with gold nuclei. It typically takes months to get a high-energy particle collider operating.
