Domain: bnl.gov
Stories and comments across the archive that link to bnl.gov.
Comments · 230
-
mmm... ethics. mmm...donut
The allocation of research funding is indeed a shambles, but then, so is academia. Academic politics are some of the worst and most vicious in the human experience. Often credibility in research communities is predicated on who your advisor is rather than the technical merit of your contribution. And while the pseudo sciences like sociology and paleo-whatever are the worst in this regard, in my experience it is a pervasive problem. That being said, like every problem there are several causes. One of the worst is the constant pressure to be a genius. Genius cannot be forced, though people constantly try or try to emulate genius closely enough to pass. It is the second group that causes the most trouble by abusing their sway in the academic world and by abdicating their responsibilities to quash competing ideas that are better than theirs.
Sorry, but i'm going to touch the stem cell bit because the recent history so clearly illustrates the failings of our current scientific politic. In my opinion, the root issue was the lack of sensitivity to the fact that embryonic stem cells (at the time) could only be collected by destroying a proto-human being. Many in that research community and their lay followers knew the issue would cause contention, but didn't care for a variety of reasons, like an "analysis" of the potential good versus the distastefulness of the means (and make no doubt, there is an element of religion to science in the popular domain, especially in health matters.) The two sides quickly polarized and several teams of researchers moved to various countries (mostly South American if memory serves) after Bush banned the funding of most stem cell research. The polarization was so complete that when methods were developed to extract some stem cells without obvious detriment to the embryo, it was to no political avail in the US. Had the researchers and their supporters been more sensitive and worked towards finding a way to diffuse the situation (say by concentrating on finding the way to not destroy the embryo early on) instead of getting nonplussed and giving the other side the bird, maybe things would have turned out differently.
And just because we imagine a research area to be clean, neat, and uninspiring of ethical dilemmas does not make it the case. Thus far physics research has been the source of our most destructive capabilities. During the Manhattan Project, we had no idea about radiation poisoning, and so many people died or were maimed during the course of that research. On the reverse side, nuclear weapon effects are vilified beyond the reality. Yes radiation is bad, nasty, and evil, but it does not make an area uninhabitable for 1000+ years as the conventional wisdom holds. People live in Hiroshima and Nagasaki today, and those bombs are were far dirtier than those we have today.
Modern particle physics is not without ethical issues either. The newer accelerators caused some physicists to have concerns regarding various potential disastrous outcomes from their use. They were taken seriously enough to get a committee to look at the issue, whose report can be found at:
http://www.bnl.gov/rhic/disaster.htm
Obviously they found that the device was safe. For various values of safe and various values of considering all variables. Since some of the potential outcomes included the destruction of the planet at a minimum, was it ethical for them to proceed? In the past, wars have been fought over less. So, in the unlikely event that say the government had decided it was too risky, and the closest "safe" alternative was for instance the moon, how much of an uproar would there be about the government interfering in science? From the tenor of most /. discussions on science my guess is quite a lot.
The point is that physics deals with how the universe around us works. Some of those mechanisms are known to be inimical to human life in close proximity. Others are unknown, but I'd bet ther -
Re:Um, Al Gore wouldn't agree...
And yet, passenger cars in the US contribute to 18% of US CO2 emissions, while in the EU, they only account for 12% of total CO2 emissions. Maybe the fact that Europeans drive less than Americans would explain their different priorities. Perhaps their cars may emit more smog and carbon-monoxide per liter of fuel, and still, because of their lighter weight, still get better gas mileage, and emit less carbon-dioxide. (But that's just a guess.)
http://www.bnl.gov/rideshare/benefits.asp
http://www.transportenvironment.org/Downloads-req- getit-lid-29.html
You may want to check out a more reputable website for your information. Your "pop" quiz is incorrect about the satellite data, which _does_ show warming trends, and is misleading about the greenhouse effect and the significance of the _rapid_ change in global average temperatures. To clarify, if it took a thousand years instead of twenty years for the recent increase in temperature, there would be a very different reaction.
The many, many, many studies done around the world show that there is a recent, rapid increase in global temperature, and that it is linked to human activities, and, in a single lifetime, left uncorrected, will cause great amounts of worldwide suffering. Also, we can mitigate the effects with substantial and early corrective actions.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/globalwarming. html#Q1 -
Earlier
Here is one from 1958:
http://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/history/higinbotham.asp -
Re:heavy elementsI would start with a chart of nuclides and a chart of the current model of subatomic particles to investigate the chain of fusions and fission.
I hope you like physics, though. The chart of nuclides can be a bit confusing at first.
-
Re:Not Sure What the Problem Here Is
But a breeder reactor is not needed to produce Pu-239. Granted, to gather it in sufficient quantities for nefarious purposes breeder reactors would help. Any nuclear reactor with U-238 can generate Pu-239: U-238+n->U-239->(beta decay)->Np-239->(beta decay)->Pu-239 (check out http://www.nndc.bnl.gov/chart/ if you don't believe me). Then just extract the Pu-239 before it absorbs another neutron and becomes Pu-240 (which is not good for making things that go boom...I will leave the proof for this as an exercise to the reader).
Fortunately for us, normal reactors do not really produce enough extractable Pu-239 for any useful purpose! However the fact remains that they DO produce it. -
Re:Dangerous mini-black-hole
Am I the only one concerned that making mini-black holes might suck in the whole earth? That they're trying this kind of stuff is pretty scary
Considering the scientists insisted that no such outcome was possible several years ago (while seeking funding), and the same scientists are now excitedly talking about the different exotic types of black holes, black saturns, etc. they're going to produce, you should be.
During the activation of the RHIC project, program managers laughed at the "absurd" idea that a black hole could be created in high-energy colliders. According to physicist Dmitri Kharzeev (of RHIC), "the risk of producing a real black hole in RHIC experiments is not higher than during our daily rides in elevators -- this danger simply does not exist."
Of course, now we find out that Kharzeev and his peers knew this was false all along and actually intend to produce them at higher energy levels now.
Unfortunately science is so far past the politicians that any effort to regulate their ethical misbehavior (an understatement in this case) is lost. It was one thing when they were hooking animal heads up to human bodies, subjecting humans to extreme cold until death, exposing prisoners to exotic diseases, performing bizarre and sickening operations on retarded children and other ethical problems that were identifiable by anyone with the smallest sense of empathy. But this kind of research is so exotic that no politician dares challenge it for fear of being made a fool of.
Perhaps the one answer these scientists will provide is that of the Drake Equation If civilizations can't manage the risk-seeking behavior of its scientists, it is certain to disappear. -
Re:Yes, but make sure funding is available
There are some models for this, including the National Nuclear Data Center (http://www.nndc.bnl.gov/) and the Protein Data Bank (http://www.pdb.org/). I'm sure there are other examples out there.
(Disclosure - I currently work at BNL, where the NNDC is located and the PDB originated). -
Re:Not to worry, it would have already happened
It's not as obvious as "10^20 > 10^12, therefore cosmic rays would have created them by now".
The amount of energy available to create new particles is governed by the total energy of the incoming particle and its target, as measured in their center of momentum frame. The LHC is a collider, so all of that 7 TeV is available to create particles. But an incoming cosmic ray of energy 10^20 eV striking an atmospheric atom has an energy in the cosmic ray-atom center of momentum frame which is proportional to the square root of its energy in the Earth's rest frame (see here); i.e., on the order of only sqrt(10^20) or 3 x 10^10 eV.
So, crudely, the LHC at energies of ~10^13 eV can be more effective at producing new particles than ultra high energy cosmic ray (UHECR) atmospheric showers at 10^20 eV.
However, I've read that cosmic rays with center-of-momentum energies of ~10^14 eV have been observed, so I think those proportionality constants I'm ignoring will turn out to matter, and that UHECR particle production energies are more significant than LHC (but only by an order of magnitude or so). For a more detailed discussion of black hole production, try Landsberg's review, or Ringwald and Tu.
Incidentally, for doomsday worriers, Hut and Rees showed back in 1984 that it is likely that two such cosmic rays have struck each other in our past (not the Earth's atmosphere) — essentially an ad-hoc collider experiment — which means a center of momentum energy ~10^20 eV. So we're safe from the universe-destroying scenarios (like tunneling out of a false vacuum), since our universe hasn't ended yet, but not necessarily from black hole production (which we would not have necessarily noticed before now). -
Re:History repeating, sort of
The problem is that Po-210 is a potent alpha emitter. Since these guys are kicking off 5 MeV alphas, you will get a huge dose localized to a few cm from the parent nucleus. In the digestive system, you'll quickly tear things apart, killing the stem cells of the intestinal tract. It gets worse if absorbed into the bloodstream and the bone marrow.
While I'm not a toxicologist, I am a nuclear physicist; one of the foremost rules of radiation safety is to avoid ingesting alpha sources (or any other source, for God's sake) for precisely this reason. FWIW, alpha sources are one of the safer things to work with, for exactly the same reason that they're so bad for you if ingested: a few cm of shielding is sufficient to stop the penetrating alpha particles.
-
Hydrogen form Solar == artifical photosynthesishttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_photosynt
h esis"Sometimes splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen by using sunlight energy is also referred to as artificial photosynthesis."
http://www.csiro.au/promos/ozadvances/Series14Art
i fical.htm -
Re:Moo
Hate replying twice, but here's a better one.
Cheers. -
Re:AwesomeActually, we encourage people to visit us. Either during the summer or any time they want to schedule a tour.
Of course, there's no major weapons work going on at BNL. At least, none that I know of.
-
Re:AwesomeActually, we encourage people to visit us. Either during the summer or any time they want to schedule a tour.
Of course, there's no major weapons work going on at BNL. At least, none that I know of.
-
Re:AwesomeActually, we encourage people to visit us. Either during the summer or any time they want to schedule a tour.
Of course, there's no major weapons work going on at BNL. At least, none that I know of.
-
Re:I'm already a convert...
The doctor explained that this is because sitting puts the more pressure on your disc than laying or standing. In fact, standing seems to be the most neutral position for your back and relieves more pressure on the disc than other positions
Standing transfers the pressure from your lower back to your feet. I suggest you follow proper ergonomics for standing if you choose a standing office. Having worked in warehouses with concrete floors for over 20 years, good shoes are imperative. Else you will just transfer the damage from your lower back to your knees, ankles, and hips. -
Re:In the beginning...
In the beginning, there was Space War and it sold poorly.
No, wait. That's not right. Let's try this again.
In the beginning, there was the Magnavox Odyssey, and it was good even though it sold poorly.
Erm... I still don't think that's right.
In the beginning, there was an oscilloscope and it... erm... it... uhhh... um—
Awww, fsck it. In the beginning there was electronics. And they were good. :-P -
oops
Ugh, needed to preview that: The video is of the 1953 computergame 'Tennis for Two'.
-
Re:In the beginning...
Pong is almost always given that honour, allthough I recon (Realmedia vid, taken from this article) is a more likely candidate for being the first video game ever.
-
Re:In the beginning...
Pong is almost always given that honour, allthough I recon (Realmedia vid, taken from this article) is a more likely candidate for being the first video game ever.
-
Re:Extremely Cost-prohibitive to useI'm fortunate enough to be working with the SNS this summer as an intern, so this is exciting news for me. I watched a presentation on the SNS about a year ago, and the Phd who gave the presentation told us the machine is already booked for the next ten years.
Though there may be other neutron sources out there, as FP mentioned, I don't believe any of them can hold a candle to the power and energy spectrum of the SNS. The reasearch is useful for just about every field out there - from basic materials science to protein dynamics. Industries are interested in the SNS as well - if I remember correctly he mentioned one company was planning to observe shampoo (though I don't recall why).
Take a look at the size of this thing: http://www.bnl.gov/nufo/images/facilities/SNS_lg.
j pg -
Re:neutrons
Wait, that's a crappy argument. I mean, a really, really crappy one.
By that argument, you could say that Ray Davis's experiment didn't work, because it didn't agree with the Standard Model, so it obviously must have been wrong.
Ray Davis built the first neutrino detection experiment and found that there was only about a third of the neutrinos coming from the Sun that you would expect.
We now know that he was right - the Standard Model was (slightly) wrong, although in hindsight it should've been relatively obvious.
Saying "their experiment doesn't work because it doesn't agree with the Standard Model" is horrible science. The Standard Model is a theory. It doesn't describe reality. It's a -guess- for how the world works - a well founded, well supported guess, and the best one we have, but still a guess. If you find that the world works in a different way, that doesn't mean your experiment must be wrong.
There are plenty of other reasons to criticize cold fusion (the lack of repeatability being the main one) but "it doesn't agree with current theory" is about the worst criticism you can give. -
Re:How did they measure it ?
Good question. There are devices that can actually measure the temperature. I have no freaking clue myself but one such device is this found in BNL. http://www.bnl.gov/RHIC/PHOBOS.htm Supposedly, it's a trillian degrees kelvin. Im sure the answer is somewhere in there.
-
The article is really confusing....
It says that the record was set for the hottest temperature ever on earth. Unfortunately, the value they list is not the highest value I can obtain for a really hot temperture. The hottest temperature I found occurs at RHIC and that is a trillion degress kelvin not fifteen million. http://www.bnl.gov/RHIC/heavy_ion.htm Could it be a record temperture for a certain type of reaction? Also to answer the question about is this safe. Yes it's safe. The temperatures only occur for such a small tiny tiny tiny fraction of a second that it really doesn't affect anything.
-
Re:them's the breaks
Large version (682x955)
-
Re:A Lot of 'Theoreticals'Just have a lock at this article:
http://www.bnl.gov/RHIC/black_holes.htmActually it's not a real black hole, but a "black hole like" object. Maybe it will serve as well
-
Re:okay, so it takes great pictures!
So it handles 4*10^12 bits a second. And there are 40*10^6 collisions a second. So (4*10^12*bits*s^-1)/(40*10^6*collisions*s^-1)=100
, 000 bits per collision. Comparitivly to a regular digital camera this is nothing but then again it is processing so much information per second. I wonder how this compares to STAR at RHIC at Brookhaven National Labs. I did research into the Rho-Muon at STAR last school year. intresting to see the advancements in computing technology.
nairb774 -
A few billions more, a few millions less
Some people like to argue that the current administration is actually increasing funding for research, something in the order of billions of dollars. True, missions like the one to Mars, which may not be feasible, do get more attention. Now, let me illustrate what effect the actual decrease of funding in nuclear research has on science. Last year, Dr. Christoph Leemann, Director of the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab) sent a clear message (read it!) to all staff and users at JLab. This is alarming! For most people outside the scientific community it is probably hard to imagine what the loss of 45 jobs at JLab means. The situation at other labs, such as the Brookhaven National Laboratory is very similar, if not worse. Let me assure you that this cut has serious consequences for a lot of people at many research labs and universities in the US. We will see how this changes education in the US.
There is more information available at the APS Public Affairs web site. -
Re:Wow.
A particle accelerator capable of producing even a tiny black hole would have to be as big as the solar system
Or it might be slightly smaller than that, perhaps the size of RHIC, according to an earlier story? -
Particle Gradient FYI
I had to search a bit but apparently this is when the amount of particles contained in a substrate changes with respect to distance and the distribution follows a pattern.
Source: here is the sight that made me understand.
This is all my speculation but I imagine this would be quite useful for narwhales since they live in a food deprived environment and could sense if they were getting closer to nutrient rich waters. -
Re:Thanks for Fixing the Problem
-
Re:"Intergalactic war", huh?
More seriously though, I heard someone describe the threat of an object accelerated to nearly the speed of light, and aimed at the earth. The resulting explosion would tear a hole right through the planet and make life unlivable.
Ummm, no. Humans currently do this all the time - it's called a particle accelerator. This is an ordinary, everyday thing at CERN, the RHIC at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and lots of other places. -
Actually NASA is not the only exception
Thats what I just said - the Bush administration (and the Clinton one before him, to a lesser degree) are business oriented and support commercial and military research (to stupidly ridiculou degrees, if you ask me - public money funds research that private companies get to hold patents on), but are less interested in pure science, which gives only long term commercial results if any at all. NASA is a partial exception, although it might be worth considering the new push for the weaponization of space is affecting the willingess to fund space exploration.
Yeah but living next this http://www.bnl.gov/RHIC/RHIC_complex.htm tends to skew your opinion.:) As far as I can tell this device is nothing but 1.1 billion dollars worth of physics that has no practical use except for maybe destroying the universe. (Im not kidding about the last part. The major contraversy is that we destroy the whole entire solar system in one accident with RHIC.) -
Should Be Open Bid
The government should only form alliances with industry where there are no other obvious partners. While Google may have a lead on search technology, opening up the partnership process to include Microsoft and Yahoo! would benefit the government more than sole sourcing.
Competition for government partnerships is always better than just selecting the current industry lead. The US government did that with office suites and is now paying a hefty price for that decision. -
Re:The Article is a troll
Actually, he's correct. Scientists have long wondered whether neutrinos have mass or not. If they did have mass, it would solve a couple of long standing problems - the missing neutrinos from the Sun and it would provide a very strong candidate for dark matter.
Well, as it happens, experimental technology finally was able to nail down the question of neutrino mass (by using the Earth as a shielding device) and sure enough, they have a very, very tiny, but measurable mass. This solved the solar neutrino problem, but did nothing for dark matter.
Although neutrinos are an excellent candidate, their mass is simply too small. Or rather, there just aren't enough of them to account for the dark matter we can detect (via galactic rotation).
On the other hand, COBE and WMAP data were indicating that not only was dark matter present, but it most likely followed the WIMP (weakly interacting massive particle) theory of dark matter. (Discarded candidates include MACHOs - massively compact halo objects - brown dwarfs and other chunks of nonlumious matter in the galactic halo; and weakly interacting light particles [no fun name] - neutrinos and the more exotic [and as yet not proven to exist] axions.)
Meanwhile, Brookhaven National Labs had noticed something odd. Muons weren't spinning like they should. And, through some rather esoteric arguments best presented in Feynman diagrams, this indicated some missing physics from the standard model. So far, there's not much to go on, but that never stopped theoretical physicists. Many papers are already running around demonstrating this violation is consistent (consistent, mind, it doesn't rule out other explanations) with the muon interacting with a field of supersymmetric particles.
Now, supersymmetric particles are the WIMP candidate of choice. They are very, very heavy and they don't interact with normal matter except gravitationally. And, if some of the preliminary string theory models of cosmology are correct, there should be a hell of a lot of them.
Now, your criticism that the poster has accepted the dark matter hypothesis as fact is nothing more than good science. Multiple independent lines of investigation have demonstrated that there is something out there not accounted for in the standard model of physics. We also know how much of it there is, how it interacts with gravity and electromagnetism (and we can make some damn good educated guesses about strong and weak force), where it conglomerates and can even map its spread through galactic clusters. Given this array of evidence, accepting dark matter as a fact quite acceptable.
As far as neutrinos, again, at one time, this was a hell of a good theory. It all hinged on how heavy the buggers were. As it turns out, they're too light to account for all the dark matter (but they certainly contribute - they are, in fact, dark matter, just not all of it). A real scientist would accept these two facts, as they are well backed up now by both theory and observation, and get cracking on just what it is making those muons wobble as well as devising some more experiments to pin down what these extra interactions are. -
Re:my two cents
http://iaeainternship.bnl.gov/Internship/Home Just followed the instructions on the above site. What matters here is having good references and also having the specific skills that they are looking for at the time of your application. School prestige/performance is not a huge deal. Good luck!
-
my two cents
I just landed an intenship for the IAEA doing
.NET development, in Vienna. (http://iaeainternship.bnl.gov/Internship/Home) Can't say much about it yet, I start in a few weeks. Has anyone else worked for the IAEA or the UN and lived abroad, and if so, what was it like? I've spent my entire life in New York and have no idea what working with an entirely linguistically diverse and all-over-the-world team is going to be like, but I'm definetily looking forward to it. -
Go for Maximum Efficiency
Electromagnetic launchers are practical NOW. "Just accelerate the space cargo in a vacuum tube until escape velocity is achieved, while climbing a high mountain." Only one key technology has been needed, and it got invented just a couple years ago. At the END of that vacuum tube, a means is needed to keep the atmosphere from rushing in while still letting the cargo exit. The plasma valve is the answer to that problem.
-
Re:https
Hopefully you are joking, but I am not convinced.
Here is a post of someone talking about why they switched, though don't follow their advice about blindly clicking on certificate warnings.
http://www.phenix.bnl.gov/phenix/WWW/lists/phenix- comp-l/msg03017.html -
Re:ughCareful now.
If I recall correctly, in an early mod to Wolf3d you were able to use a small, silver teaspoon to beat to death nazi scum. The unlocked "Mature" version allowed you to calmly stir sugar and a bit of lemon into your Tea-Health-Pak using the same gore and blood soaked spoon while the next level loaded.
The Eternal Wedgie infringes on the IP of Duh Software who, using the name "Internal Wedgie" (vastly more painful and requiring salad tongs to remove) incorporated the move into several of their early titles.
And if this website is correct http://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/history/higinbotham.asp this guy made the first video game. His IP rights on using CRT technology to display "games" has been infringed upon for years and years.
I wonder who came up with the idea of putting computers on flat surfaces ("desks" or "tables") and sitting on "chairs" nearby to have easy access to the input devices. They've gotta be owed billions by now.
-
Re:Another giant step backward...
really, why not lay out an experiment for me that can disprove the numerous theories put forth by evolutionists that try to explain what happened before the big bang (you know, I mean here we have essentially nothing or a tiny super-singularity but what was before. I've heard a half dozen theories but I don't see a discernable test for any of them.
The theory of natural selection and Darwinian evolution doesn't have anything to do with the big bang. They're independant theories based upon mostly independant evidence. One could be true while the other is false. In any case, for the moment both seem to explain our observations pretty well. The question of what happened in the very early universe (strictly speaking this is not before the big bang, actually slightly after) is still open, but trying to figure out possible explanations and test them is what many many scientists are up to. For any scientist studying these issues, obtaining testable ideas is the ultimate goal. Reading some accounts of what's going on in Physics may not give you that impression, but's it's the truth.
WMAP is probably one of the most recent and most successful attempts to directly measure evidence from the early universe, but experiments at RHIC and elsewhere are also probing the physics that would have been important at that point in time. These experiements are constantly giving us new data to help us understand the early universe and rule out many candidate theories about what might have been going on then. This is precisely the sort of thing that differentiates legitimate science from pseudoscience like intelligent design.
-
Superfluid or Not a Superfluid?
The problem I see is, something is either a superfluid or it isn't.
From the article, it appears that the quark-gluon plasma behaves close to a low viscosity fluid, not a superfluid.
The difference is with a low viscosity fluid you can usually estimate it as having no viscosity and have your calculations come out close. However, a superfluid actually has no viscosity due to a quantum mechanical effect, but also has other interesting properties.
So is it a Superfulid? I'll have to read the paper when it is published.
Oh, the BNL source article (with links) is here. -
Get the papers here
The papers from the RHIC collaborations. The "liquid" state of quark-gluon plasma being discussed is called a color glass condensate.
-
Re:Not much of a surprise
I don't think you know what you're talking about, either. The RHIC results being discussed are not referring to a superfluid state of matter; read the papers yourself. No mention of superfluidity, just of a low-viscosity, rapidly thermalizing liquid -- what they refer to as a "color glass condensate". (This is not to say that superfluidity can't occur in QCD; it's just not what the article is talking about.)
-
Black holes also being created at RHIC?I for one wouldn't want to work at these labs - according to the following link on their site one of their researchers believe the equivalent of a black hole is being created in the Heavy Ion Collider as well:
http://www.bnl.gov/RHIC/black_holes.htm
From the above URL:
Horatiu Nastase, a member of the high-energy physics theory group at Brown University, has written a paper, posted on the preprint website arxiv.org, in which he claims that collisions at Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) produce the analog of a black hole.
Horatiu is referring to a mathematical similarity between the physics of the real world, which govern RHIC collisions, and the physics that scientists use to describe a theoretical, "imaginary" black hole in a hypothetical world with a different number of space-time dimensions (more than the four dimensions -- three space directions and time -- that exist in our world). That is, the two situations require similar mathematical wrangling to analyze. This imaginary, mathematical black hole that Horatiu compares to the RHIC fireball is completely different from a black hole in the real universe; in particular, it cannot grow by gobbling up matter. In other words, and because the amount of matter created at RHIC is so tiny, RHIC does not, and cannot possibly, produce a true, star-swallowing black hole.
This does not mean, however, that RHIC cannot study some of the phenomena that happen in the vicinity of black holes, as explained in a paper we wrote with Kirill Tuchin, also of Brookhaven's theoretical nuclear physics group. The explanation for this begins with Einstein's "Equivalence Principle," which states that gravity and acceleration (or deceleration) are actually equivalent forces. The principle explains why a person going up in an elevator feels slightly heavier, just as they would if gravity on Earth were stronger.
In the same way, the rapid deceleration of RHIC ions as they smash into each other for a very short period of time (about 10^(-23) second) is similar to the extreme gravitational environment in the vicinity of a black hole. This means that RHIC collisions should emit a bunch of thermal particles similar to the "Hawking radiation" emitted by a black hole. Since Hawking radiation is the cause of black hole decay, not formation, its existence would be yet another reason that RHIC cannot produce a real gravitational black hole.
-
That's one interpretationThe scientists themselves suggest that the liquid state is one of a number of states that quark/gluon soups can take, but that the early Universe was still most likely a gas.
Of course, all their software is in CVS, so it shouldn't be too hard to check their calculations. :) -
Run, don't walk...
And, of course, scientists are well aware of the risk
Apparently RHIC's scientists are not. John Marburger, Brookhaven's director, specifically said:
"There is simply not enough matter or energy in the RHIC collisions to create a black hole. This conclusion does not require difficult or obscure calculations and has not been questioned by any physicist in a relevant field who has considered the matter."
That's pretty blunt, clearly stating that anyone who believed such an option was possible was a kook or fraud and not possessing a credible scientific background (one should always regard such approaches as a good indication that there is something to be concerned about). Now that the shoe is on the other foot, it would appear that Brookhaven's program should be immediately suspended and its managers and scientists put before Congressional inquiry.
Read Marburger's earlier statement in full here: Statement on ABCNEWS Website Article on RHIC
-
RHIC public relations
When RHIC was announced, some in the scientific community expressed concern that it could do just this. The RHIC public relations crew came out and laughed off the concerns as bogus.
Specifically, they said that black holes simply cannot be created whatsoever as there just isn't enough matter or energy for this to happen. The full committee report debunking any such black hole nonsense can be found here.
So now that it has been demonstrated that RHIC's scientists were completely wrong, we're supposed to have further confidence in them how? That the accidental black hole didn't cause the earth to disappear isn't quite sufficient for an answer. -
NO, it was NOT a "Black Hole'In this case an RTFA and then search for media hysteria relevant to this (Scientists cause End of the Universe, film at 11 !) does less good than bad. You can read Dr. Nastase's paper here . While I cannot claim to understand the math, the text provides some clues. The claim presented here is NOT that "A Black Hole Was Formed", and the hysterial headline "Long Island Sucks, and it's gonna kill is all !" is just so much media whoring bullshit. The observations attempted to use existing mathematical models of black hole behaviours and develop an analog for the behaviour of the Quark Gluon Plasma experiment's behavior.
Want more ? Here is the Home page-Science Lite for the STAR detector
Please note also that Dr. Nastase was beating these same drums back in 99. I expect that this paper is science politics- at that level you don't want anyone to think you were wrong, so you will spend significant effort at proving your predictions right, despite evidence to the contrary. Oh, and he's not even on the project- he's sucking down other people's results after the fact.
-
See the RHIC 'atom smasher' in person
The Brookhaven National Lab located on eastern Long Island, NY gives summer Sunday tours of their facilities(2004 schedule). If you have the chance, then GO! Seeing RHIC up close if pretty damn cool. I'm no particle physicist but their tours are quite impressive and are given by the researchers themselves. Oh, and yes they have beowulf linux clusters too.
-
They already thought of that...
Go here: http://www.bnl.gov/RHIC/disaster.htm