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Looking for Quark-Gluon Plasma?
uctbruce writes "Following the June press release from Brookhaven National Lab, nuclear physicists from around the world are discussing the results of the 4 RHIC experiments (PHOBOS, STAR, PHENIX and BRAHMS), the New York Times ran an article on the Quark Matter conference in Oakland. Have we re-created the first microseconds of the big bang in the lab? (Have a look at the Google cluster of stories)"
You're right, we should limit the experimenting to only those things that are well understood.
As opposed to investigating the unknown, we should create elaborate competing mythologies and kill all those who don't agree with us.
Actually, of those three, the only one to pose a large-scale danger is fission.
Fusion needs a lot of heat and pressure to occur. If a fusion chamber were to fail, the fusion would stop almost instantly, and a plume of hot hydrogen/helium would come out and rise upwards very quickly, where it would cool rapidly. The people near the reactor would be in serious danger, and an airplane directly over the plant may be in danger (Which is why it's a good idea to have no-fly zones over power plants in general), but people living a couple miles away would be safe as long as the fire department was running on time.
This experiment is another simmilar thing. It's just a bunch of plasma in a chamber. If it gets out, it cools rapidly and dissipates. Dangerous if you're sitting on it, but nothing to worry about otherwise.
Fission, on the other hand, can start cold, and even if it stops, the material you're left with is still radioactive. If fission stops, you just have a bunch of helium floating around, and it's not all that dangerous.
This experiment is another simmilar thing. It's just a bunch of plasma in a chamber. If it gets out, it cools rapidly and dissipates. Dangerous if you're sitting on it, but nothing to worry about otherwise.
You make it sound like more than it is, unless by 'a bunch of plasma' you mean a microscopic speck. These experiments aren't 'recreating the big bang', that's just reporters trying to make it sound interesting because the don't really know enough about it to find it interesting for it's real value. They aren't recreating the big bang, they are recreating the conditions that existed for a milisecond after the big bang, on a scale equal to the scale of a couple nuclei compared to the mass and energy of the entire universe when the actual big bang happened (in theory).
These plasmas are the beginning of production some of the finest quality of some of the subtlest characteristics of matter of which we are aware. Past revolutions of this kind gave us magnetic compasses from consistently oriented domains, optical lenses from consistently curved refraction interfaces, and lasers from consistently phased light. Each newly consistent material advance produced a revolution in mesoscopic properties, from aggregate subtle effects at the micro level. Even the oldest revolution of those I mentioned, in magnetism, is still underway at a rapid pace. Now that we are beginning to introduce order at the femtoscopic level, what novel properties of these classes of matter do you believe possible? Care to hazard a guess?
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make install -not war
Most of these researches are funded for weapons production, which values maximum destruction.
It should be pointed out that the maximum destruction paradigm of war has passed. Thirty years ago, you couldn't get a nickle if your bomb wasn't at least 80 megatons, but look at most of the current arsenals. The largest weapons used are 20,000 pounds - ten tons. And the most heaviliy used weapons are ones that have a remarkably small yeild, and normally don't destroy entire buildings. Even during the Cold War, the arsenals actually used in Vietnam and other conflicts weren't much different than our current arsenals, minus the fancy guidance and targeting electronics.
You can argue pretty well that this isn't a humanitarian effort, but a capitalist one. After all, if you deploy maximum destruction too exensively, there's nothing left afterwards.
Most countries learned their lesson after World War II. We did such a number on Germany at the end of the war that there was hardly anything left worth occupying - and indeed, if it weren't for the US and the USSR both expecting the other to occupy the rest of the country the second either one flinched, there probably wouldn't have been foreign armies stationed there for decades.
The experiments in question aren't supposed to explain how or why the universe exists. They're designed to increase our understanding of what it was like at earlier and earlier points in its development, and to improve our understanding of the fundamental nature of matter and energy.
The problem is not that "The laws of physics break in a singularity". It's that understanding the Planck era (first 10E-40 seconds, I think) requires reconciling quantum theories with general relativity.
And scientists don't make claims they can't back up. Not about their science, not if they're going to be taken seriously (i.e. keep doing science). The last notable time it happened was a couple of guys named Pons and Fleischman. Their careers did not benefit.
Describing a very sophisticated set of experiments is difficult. The people involved don't say "we can't explain why, but trust me we are right." They may point out that understanding a *real* explanation requires the equivalent of a graduate education. For public consumption, they have to give dumbed-down versions to reporters, even very smart science reporters. It's the dumbing-down process that leads to saying things like "re-create the Big Bang", because most people have no clue what it means to 'set up conditions similar to those of the universe at 10E-32 seconds.'
Being "tired of scientist [sic] making claims that they just can't back up" looks an awful lot like confusing science and science reporting, or science and policy.