Scientists Gone Wild

Location: Maryland

Okay, just wow.....

From a BBC article:

Scientists have quashed suggestions that a £350m experiment planned for the autumn could cause the destruction of the Earth.

The director of the laboratory commissioning the machine says there is "no chance" of the atom-smashing experiment causing a disaster, such as a black hole that would devour the entire Earth.

Researchers have spent eight years constructing the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island in New York state. Its goal is to smash the nuclei of atoms together and study their wreckage to determine the fundamental properties of matter.
RHIC takes atoms of gold and swings them around two 3.8 kilometre (2.4 mile) circular tubes where powerful magnets accelerate them to almost the speed of light. When they collide, they do so in minute collisions that are 10,000 times hotter than the Sun.

Scientists hope to create a quark-gluon plasma, a fundamental state of matter that probably has not existed naturally in the Universe since the Big Bang.

Armageddon?

But could they create something else, a mini-black hole perhaps or a new form of particle with unknown properties that could expand and engulf the Earth?

That was the suggestion made recently in the letters section of the Scientific American magazine, "I am concerned that physicists are going where it is unsafe to go," said one correspondent

If a mini black hole was created then some speculate that, in certain circumstances and if it was next to a concentration of mass, it could become stable and continue to grow. It would be drawn towards the centre of the Earth, where it would start to grow. It might engulf the entire Earth within minutes.

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Scientists Gone Wild