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Re: Dangerous Ion Colliding Experiment? (Long - includes theory o f the field)



Hi all-
Sam Held writes, for a start:
************************************************************
Doug,
I am currently doing work on the PHENIX experiment at Brookhaven
National Lab's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). I have read the
article and personally been asked these very questions. I am familiar
with the physics and the theory surrounding it. Just so you know, this
is same as screaming we found cold fusion in our garage - good press but
bad physics (or experiment and statistics in the cold fusion case). For
more info. than below, I encourage you to visit http://www.rhic.bnl.gov
and http://www.phenix.bnl.gov.
***************************
Sam is faithful to the "quark-gluon plasma party" line, but
all of this is not without controversy and is based upon speculative
model calculations. The speculation is, essentially, that the collision
energy will remain in a confined region long enough for the quark-gluon
plasma to evolve. There are CERN experiments that bear upon this question,
but the RHIC spokesman who gave a colloquium at Argonne a few months ago
studiously avoided discussion of them. I have not carefully followed those
experiments and will not, therefore, try to comment.
Rocky Kolb (U of Chicago-Fermilab) has argued that we should not publicize
high energy experiments as recreating the early universe. He says he gets more
intelligent audience reactions when he describes an accelerator as a "more powerful
microscope" for investigating the structure of matter. I think that the RHIC
experiments can be described in a similar spirit, but I will leave that as
a challenge for the nuclear physicists.
Regards,
Jack

"I scored the next great triumph for science myself,
to wit, how the milk gets into the cow. Both of us
had marveled over that mystery a long time. We had
followed the cows around for years - that is, in the
daytime - but had never caught them drinking fluid of
that color."
Mark Twain, Extract from Eve's
Autobiography