Word: strangelets
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...specific concern filed by Wagner and Sancho is that according to some theories, the LHC, by fracturing atoms into smaller and smaller parts, may create one of three exotic yet dangerous possibilities. The first option is a strangelet, a small particle that makes other atoms strangelets until it “eventually [converts] all of Earth into a single larger ‘strangelet’ of huge size.” If you don’t like the prospect of being turned into exotic atomic material without your consent, then perhaps you should consider what?...
After reading Catastrophe, I spent several sleepless nights worrying about the 600 innocent souls who—in our hypothetical world of risk-benefit analysis—will be swallowed alive by an out-of-control strangelet sometime in the next decade. I was so furious that I started rounding up fellow socially-minded Harvardians to head to RHIC’s Upton, N.Y. home and protest this travesty. In a fearful fury, I decided to check with Harvard’s crack team of experimental high energy physicists to see whether Posner’s calculations are on-target...
...conditions in RHIC could produce a strangelet disaster, physicists argue, then we would probably be dead already...
...benefit analysis is only useful if the risk is non-zero,” Feldman wrote in an e-mail. “But in the strangelet scenario, “the risk is sufficiently close to zero that risk-benefit analysis is not helpful...
...Posner writes, “social control of science cannot be left to the scientists.” In challenging his readers to wade into the arcane debate over strangelet disasters, Posner brings particle physics to the masses. By framing cost-benefit calculations in lucid prose, Posner helps the non-economists among us make decisions in the face of unlikely but potentially earth-shattering risks...