60秒科学:"世界末日"-1999年加速器（在线收听）

在最近举行的美国科学促进会会议上，石溪大学的Robert Crease谈到了世界末日的恐慌，涉及《科学美国人》和RHIC。

At the recent AAAS meeting, Stony Brook University’s Robert Crease talked about a doomsday scare involving Scientific American and Brookhaven National Lab’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC:

“As the accelerator neared completion in 1999, Scientific American ran an article about RHIC, called ‘A Little Big Bang,’ with the title referring to the machine’s ambition to study forms of matter in the early universe.”

A reader wrote in wondering if black holes might be created. Sci Am printed the letter with a considered response from physicist Frank Wilczek.

“Wilzcek said that the black hole scenario was incredible. But he also said that there’s a more likely possibility that it might create strangelets, which would swallow ordinary matter and described that as [merely] not plausible. That then prompted a series of headlines including this from the Sunday Times of London, entitled ‘Big Bang Machine Could Destroy Earth’.”

Scientific American, Brookhaven and the Earth survived. Wilczek won the Nobel Prize in 2004 for his earlier work.

—Steve Mirsky

在最近举行的美国科学促进会会议上，石溪大学的Robert Crease谈到了世界末日的恐慌，涉及《科学美国人》和RHIC。

“1999年加速器接近完工，《科学美国人》发表了一篇关于RHIC的文章《小型大爆炸》，标题指出RHIC是用来研究早期宇宙物质形式的。”

一位读者写信询问是否会产生黑洞。《科学美国人》刊发了这封信，并附带了物理学家弗兰克维尔泽克深思熟虑的一封回信。

Wilzcek说，产生黑洞的说法不可信。但healso说可能性更大的是可能会产生奇异夸克物质，它将吞下普通物质，他认为黑洞是不可能的。之后《伦敦星期日时报》发表一系列含有此类内容的的新闻摘要，标题为《大爆炸机会摧毁地球》。

科学美国人，美国国立brookhaven（布鲁克海文）国家实验室和地球还活着。维尔泽克由于早期的工作在2004年赢得了诺贝尔奖