FW: Statement on Committee Review of Speculative "Disaster Scenarios"at Brookhaven Lab's RHIC

["Bill Zajc" <zajc@columbia.edu>]

Dear PHENIX Colleagues:

Please read the enclosed message and follow the web links for a 
technical discussion (and subsequent dismissal based on their
total implausibility) of the various RHIC "disaster"
speculations.

Best regards,

Bill

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-bnl-announce-l@bnl.gov
[mailto:owner-bnl-announce-l@bnl.gov]On Behalf Of BNL Media &
Communications
Sent: Wednesday, October 06, 1999 6:53 PM
To: bnl-announce-l@bnl.gov
Subject: Statement on Committee Review of Speculative "Disaster
Scenarios"at Brookhaven Lab's RHIC


The following statement was issued today by Brookhaven National Laboratory.
***
Statement on Committee Review of Speculative "Disaster Scenarios" at
Brookhaven Lab's RHIC
October 6, 1999

Brookhaven National Laboratory has posted on its Web site a report by
expert physicists who recently reviewed speculative disaster scenarios at
the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider.

The report summarizes technical discussions that conclude there is no
danger of a "disaster" at RHIC.

In July 1999, Brookhaven Lab Director John Marburger convened a committee
of distinguished physicists to write a comprehensive report on the
arguments that address the safety of each of the speculative disaster
scenarios at RHIC. The scenarios are:

1. Creation of a black hole that would "eat" ordinary matter.
2. Initiation of a transition to a new, more stable universe.
3. Formation of a "strangelet" that would convert ordinary matter to a new
form.

"We conclude that there are no credible mechanisms for catastrophic
scenarios at RHIC," said committee chair Robert Jaffe, Professor of Physics
and Director, Center for Theoretical Physics at Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. "Accordingly, we see no reason to delay RHIC operation."

Added Brookhaven Director Marburger, "Nature has been creating collisions
of energies comparable to those at RHIC for billions of years, and there is
no evidence of any kind of disaster related to those collisions. RHIC does
not take us beyond the limits of natural phenomena. It brings a rare
phenomenon into the view of our instruments so we can puzzle out its inner
workings."

On October 4, Brookhaven Lab celebrated the commissioning of RHIC, the
world's newest and biggest particle accelerator for nuclear physics
research. All together, close to 1,000 scientists from 90 research
institutions representing 19 countries will be working on RHIC experiments.

The committee report can be viewed at
http://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/rhicreport.html
***

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