MSNBC News on the "Big debate over a 'Little Big Bang'"

[Brant Johnson <brant@bnl.gov>]

Dear PHENIXians,
	
	At last -- a balanced and reasonable news report on RHIC.
Please see http://www.msnbc.com/news/314049.asp#BODY  
and a related story:  http://www.msnbc.com/news/202284.asp

====================================================================
	With the Sept. 21 article there is even a more reasonable poll
(current voting shown).

       What do you think of the collider experiment?

_22%_  The potential risks are worrisome.

_60%_  It's valuable science with negligible risks.

_13%_  Big Bang? No big deal.

__5%_  None of the above (share your view on the Mysteries BBS).
===================================================================

Below is the text of the story.  If you don't have time to read the
whole thing, here are my two favorite sections:


   "If strangelets could be made in RHIC, they also would have been made
in cosmic rays," Jaffe explained.
   The physicists determined that about a trillion cosmic-ray collisions
per second were occurring on the moon at energies sufficient to create
strangelets. That compares with a half-trillion collisions over RHIC's
anticipated 10 years of operation, Jaffe said. Yet, the scientists saw no
evidence of any lasting effect that could be traced to strange matter.
   "The fact that planets and stars have not been converted to strange
matter is evidence that this Rube Goldberg string does not exist," Jaffe
said. "Cosmic rays basically rule out this possibility. Our conclusion is
that there's no reason to fear for any safety concern at RHIC."

...

   And so, although the draft report is yet to be released, the plans for
RHIC appear to be on track: The 2.4-mile-wide collider ring will be
dedicated as scheduled at an Oct. 4 ceremony during which Brookhave 
spokeswoman Mona Rowe says the local high school's cheerleaders will
perform an interpretation of quark-gluon interactions. And the collisions
are likely to begin in December or January.


Brant

---------------------  Full text of the story  -------------------------

Big debate over a "Little Big Bang"
  
   Real-life quest for quarks sparks science-fiction speculation 
 
By Alan Boyle, MSNBC

   Sept. 21 --  Some have made it out to be a "mad
   scientist" story: Using an experimental particle
   collider, researchers are planning to create an
   exotic kind of matter they believe existed a
   millionth of a second after the Big Bang. But in
   this case, the scientists are really mad -- about
   the doomsday talk that has overshadowed the
   experiment itself.  


   THE EXPERIMENT, which is to take place at Brookhaven National
Laboratory's new $600 million Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in New York,
aims to smash gold nuclei together at 99.95 percent of the speed of light
creating temperatures of more than a trillion degrees. That's 10,000
times hotter than the sun, says Tom Ludlam, RHIC's associate project
director.
   "Under those conditions, neutrons and protons in the atomic nuclei
would literally melt into a plasma of quarks," he said. "It's a
thermodynamic phase transition, like water changing from a solid to a
liquid, or a liquid to a gas when it boils."
   Physicists say that the neutrons and protons within ordinary matter are
actually built up from combinations of quarks, particles that were first
postulated in the 1960s. The quarks are bound together through the
exchange of particles whimsically dubbed gluons. Thus, the object of
Ludlam's 15-year quest at Brookhaven is to create a brew called
quark-gluon plasma.
   "The quark-gluon plasma exists for just a flash of time," he said -- in
fact, for only a billionth of a trillionth of a second.  The Relativistic
Heavy Ion Collider will zap beams of atomic nuclei at nearly the speed of
light around a 2.4-mile-wide ring - visible at upper left in this aerial
photograph.
   Cosmologists believe that the universe as we know it began billions of
years ago in a cataclysm popularly known as the Big Bang, and that in the
first millionth of a second after that Big Bang, the entire cosmos was
contained in an ultradense, ultrahot dollop of quark-gluon soup.
   But physicists have never actually seen such a brew.
   "Part of the motive (for doing the experiment) is in fact to confirm
that such a state of matter exists, by discovering it," Ludlam said.  "As
far as we know, it doesn't exist in the present universe, although it
could exist in the centers of very dense stars.
   "But the real motivation is to look at this phase transition from
ordinary matter to this deconstructed plasma, and then back again. And
then try to answer the question of why is it that there are these
preferred configurations of quarks, and could there in fact be other
configurations. ... It opens up a vast new realm of exploration for people
who do nuclear physics."
   
SCIENCE FICTION
   The magnitude of the mystery is the prime factor behind the collider’s
allure -- and behind the "mad scientist" angle as well. Last year, the
concept behind RHIC (pronounced "rick") spawned a science-fiction novel
titled "Cosm," in which the collider produces what turns out to be a
strange new cosmos. Ludlam was even written into the plot as a minor
character.
   "To be honest, I haven't read the book," Ludlam confessed. But he said
others have told him everything turns out all right. "At least the world
didn't get destroyed."
   This year, however, the tales involving RHIC have had a different
twist: It all started with a letter published in July's issue of
Scientific American, asking whether the creation of a quark-gluon plasma
could possibly create a black hole. Frank Wilczek of Princeton's Institute
for Advanced Study replied that "dangerous surprises seem extremely
unlikely." But he also referred to a speculative scenario involving
something called "strangelets." Strangelets would contain "strange"
quarks
-- which are somewhat heavier and less understood than the garden-variety
"up" and "down" quarks that make up ordinary protons and neutrons. If a
series of highly unlikely conditions apply, strangelets could in theory
gobble up ordinary matter, and it's that scenario that has captured the
attention of physicists as well as the popular press.
   Most notably, The Sunday Times of London headlined its story "Big Bang
Machine Could Destroy Earth." Other media outlets reported on the
black-hole-strangelet brouhaha in terms that made some scientists see red.
Brookhaven's director, John Marburger, issued two news releases
downplaying the concerns -- but also asked a panel of scientists to
investigate the potential risks.
   "There is a series of unlikelihoods that you'd have to string together
like a Rube Goldberg invention," said Robert Jaffe, director of the Center
for Theoretical Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who
headed up the panel. "But if you strung them up all together, you'd end up
with what could be a dangerous situation."
   
STRANGE SCENARIOS
   Jaffe said while strangelets could exist within the cores of
supermassive stars, it would be far more difficult -- "pretty damn near
impossible," to use a technical term -- to create tiny bits of strange
matter within RHIC.
   And even if strangelets were created within RHIC, they would not
necessarily be destructive.
   "The most likely scenario is that a strangelet would have a positive
charge, but a small charge," Jaffe said. In that case, strangelets would
be admittedly bizarre but basically harmless — for example, something like
grossly overweight helium atoms.
   The danger would arise only if the strangelet nuclei happened to carry
a negative charge. The strangelet lumps would attract ordinary nuclei and
consume them like so many dots in a Pac-Man game.
   "It would kind of burp a few times, and after readjustment it would
have a negative charge again," Jaffe said. "It would eat more, and burp
and capture, and burp and capture to the point that it has eaten all the
matter around it."
   Is such a scenario possible? To weigh that question, the panel of
scientists considered the analogous natural phenomenon of cosmic-ray
collisions.
   "If strangelets could be made in RHIC, they also would have been made
in cosmic rays," Jaffe explained.
   The physicists determined that about a trillion cosmic-ray collisions
per second were occurring on the moon at energies sufficient to create
strangelets. That compares with a half-trillion collisions over RHIC's
anticipated 10 years of operation, Jaffe said. Yet, the scientists saw no
evidence of any lasting effect that could be traced to strange matter.
   "The fact that planets and stars have not been converted to strange
matter is evidence that this Rube Goldberg string does not exist," Jaffe
said. "Cosmic rays basically rule out this possibility. Our conclusion is
that there's no reason to fear for any safety concern at RHIC."
   
ALL SYSTEMS GO
   And so, although the draft report is yet to be released, the plans for
RHIC appear to be on track: The 2.4-mile-wide collider ring will be
dedicated as scheduled at an Oct. 4 ceremony during which Brookhaven
spokeswoman Mona Rowe says the local high school's cheerleaders will
perform an interpretation of quark-gluon interactions. And the collisions
are likely to begin in December or January.
   "Whenever a big new machine turns on that reaches to yet higher
energies in these collisions of elementary particles, there's always
speculation about these disaster scenarios," Ludlam said. "Especially now,
with millennium fever starting to set in, the effect is a little bit more
pronounced."
   Jaffe said the controversy also plays off an age-old clash of
philosophies.
   "There's a tone in the messages that I've received, that scientists
are playing God," he said. "I think scientists have been guilty in the
past of being Faustian, of hungering for too much knowledge. But actually,
these experiments, and the whole tone of modern science, are much more
circumspect.
   "In contrast, the idea that we could do something that could disrupt
the fabric of the universe is actually rather Ptolemaic," he said,
referring to the ancient view that Earth was at the center of the cosmos.
"Everything doesn’t revolve around us."