THE probability that dangerous Earth-devouring particles will be born at a new particle accelerator in the US may be tiny, but scientists have played down the devastating potential costs in their risk assessments, a physicist now says.
Adrian Kent of Cambridge University accepts that the chances of catastrophe are minuscule. But he claims physicists are not accounting for the scale of the potential devastation—the destruction of the entire planet—in their risk analysis. "Small catastrophe risks are more costly than we've generally considered," says Kent.
Last year, sensational newspaper reports suggested that a new particle accelerator, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, could put the Earth in peril. The accelerator might create blobs of matter called strangelets containing "strange" quarks, as well as the usual "up" and "down" types in ordinary matter. If a strangelet were stable and negatively charged, it might begin eating ...
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