Xarg blog Archive

There was a story on /. about the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider which caught my eye since I worked at Brookhaven for a year when they initially got funding to build the RHIC. Big physics is an amazing thing to behold - detectors the size of houses, petabytes of data, and giant rings of superconducting magnets.

The only real downer would be if the collider caused the the universe to explode. The "transition to a lower vacuum state" sounds like the "rip in spacetime" that threatens starships the galaxy over...

Although certainly nothing in our existing knowledge of the laws of Nature demands it, several physicists have speculated on the possibility that our contemporary `vacuum' is only metastable, and that a sufficiently violent disturbance might trigger its decay into something quite different. A transition of this kind would propagate outward from its source throughout the universe at the speed of light, and would be catastrophic.

The creation of a black hole or a stable "strangelet" that eats the planet are the other two scenarios they cover, but by comparison they seem almost benign. Of course they argue that interactions like this have happened many times in the past and if it was even vanishingly likely that something like this could happen it would have already happened.