: ABCNEWS.com Fred Moody: The Big Bang, Part 2
9/12/02 8:40 AM
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If scientists can be counted on for anything, it's for creating unintended consequences. (Michael Dougan)
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The hubris of trying to replicate the universe just Melville is preoccupied with what he after the Big regards as the most dangerous event in human history: an experiment, scheduled for Bang could have November, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in catastrophic Upton, N.Y. Brookhaven has a device, called the consequences. Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, that has the worlds physicists tremendously excited. Scientists believe they Related Stories can use the collider to duplicate the conditions that Black Hole May prevailed milliseconds after the Big Bang, when the Have Been Born in universe consisted of a primordial soup called the quark- Supernova gluon plasma. Brookhaven scientists think that by colliding gold ions at extremely high speed, they can create a tiny, fleeting version of quark-gluon plasma to gain a better understanding of the origins of the universe. Sounds like fun. The only problem, according to David Melvilles panicky e-mail, is that, It has been Scientific theorized by Steven Hawking that from this quark-gluon American plasma other forms of matter are also produced. The contains letters most dangerous being a black hole. debating the black-hole Consumed From the Inside Out possibility, and the London All I know about black holes is that they have zero Sunday Times volume and infinite density. They sit in deep space, has trapping everything that comes near enough (crossing inside whats known as the Schwarzschild radius) and editorialized against the letting nothing escape, even light. So I am perplexed. What happens if you create one in experiment, which it a laboratory?
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David Melville is an eccentric physicist and thinker, and a friend of mine. Hes also terrified.
http://rhip.phys.utk.edu/rhip/RHICNews/news/ABCNEWS_com%20%20Fred%20Moody%20The%20Big%20Bang,%20Part%202.htm
ABCNEWS.com : Fred Moody: The Big Bang, Part 2
9/12/02 8:40 AM
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Melville says he believes it would be microscopic at first but would grow exponentially, eventually obliterating Earth. The black hole would first eat its way down toward the center of Earth and consume from the inside out. It would not be a good time to be around to see this. In the end ALL of Earth would be consumed. When I started looking into this, I was stunned to find that other physicists are speculating along the same lines as Melville. The July 1999 Scientific American contains letters debating the possibility Melville raises, and the July 18 Sunday Times of London reported on and editorialized against the experiment, which it considers frighteningly dangerous. So its not just paranoid physicists and rogue journalists concerned about the RHIC. Hoping to forestall the end of the world, I contacted Brookhaven immediately. We certainly do not wish to destroy the earth, sniffed spokeswoman Diane Greenberg, who clearly has been fielding plenty of questions like mine. Then she sent me a statement by Brookhaven Lab Director John Marburger, entitled On Consequences of RHIC Operations. The amount of matter involved in the RHIC collisions is exceedingly small only a single pair of nuclei is involved in each collision, Marburger states. Our universe have would to be extremely unstable in order for such a small amount of energy to cause a large effect. On the contrary, the universe appears to be quite stable against releases of much larger amounts of energy that occur in astrophysical processes. RHIC collisions will be within the spectrum of energies encompassed by naturally occurring cosmic radiation. The earth and its companion objects in our solar system have survived billions of years of cosmic ray collisions with no evidence of the instabilities that have been the subject of speculation in connection with RHIC. Why am I not reassured by this? The short answer is that the experiment is conducted by human beings the same folks who brought you the internal combustion engine, which threatens to destabilize the planets climate, and powerful antibiotics, which ultimately created an invincible staphylococcus bacterium. In other words, technopride goeth before the fall. The longer answer is that Melvilles scenario is perversely seductive in a Kubrickian sort of way. Think of Dr. Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey. There are few things quite as persuasive as the vision of humans, their thirst for knowledge and progress insatiable, stumbling on a way to destroy the planet. It is an end-ofthe-world scenario that has launched a thousand movie
considers frighteningly dangerous.
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A R C H I V E
Read Fred Moodys past columns
Playing at God
http://rhip.phys.utk.edu/rhip/RHICNews/news/ABCNEWS_com%20%20Fred%20Moody%20The%20Big%20Bang,%20Part%202.htm
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ABCNEWS.com : Fred Moody: The Big Bang, Part 2
9/12/02 8:40 AM
scripts. Human progress has always had a nasty habit of producing unintended consequences usually because the prideful progenitors of progress insist on poohpoohing any possibility of danger. Now, in recreating the beginning of the universe, we are essentially playing at being God an unforgivable offense, punishable, as tragedians in the Bible and other literature have prophesied for centuries, by annihilation.
The Doomsday Machine
This Doomsday scenario dovetails creepily with the speculation put forth by the late Carl Sagan in his book Cosmos. Sagan believed that we could never find evidence of life anywhere...