The relativistic heavy-ion collider has begun working and we’re still here. This newest and biggest particle accelerator in the world has been aiming gold ions at each other. The thought is that the quarks and gluons that make up the protons and neutrons in the gold nuclei will be freed for a fleeting moment to exist in a plasma simulating the conditions in the universe in the first millionths of a second after the Big Bang. The problem is that some credible critics feared that this might create a mini-black hole that would suck up all surrounding matter, perhaps destroying the earth. Others felt a new form of matter made up of strange quarks might begin converting all the other matter nearby to its type, sort of like Vonnegut’s Ice-9. Some physicists feared that such an energetic collision might even cause a decay in the fabric of empty space itself which would propagate outward at the speed of light until it changed the entire universe. Brookhaven National Laboratory actually convened a committee to consider such speculative disaster scenarios, which concluded that “…the candidate mechanisms for catastrophic

scenarios at RHIC are firmly excluded by existing empirical evidence, compelling theoretical arguments, or both. Accordingly, we see no reason

to delay the commissioning of RHIC on their account.” Many people have been reminded of the concerns in 1945 that the first fission bomb explosion might set the whole atmosphere on fire. Put yourself in the head of the scientist at the moment her/his finger is poised on the final button to initiate any of these experiments…