Collision Coverage

Four years ago somewhere in New York the Brookhaven Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider started operating. I'm not even going to pretend what that exactly means. Apparently has something to do with studying how the universe looked like right after the big bang by colliding gold ions...again I don't know exactly what that means and would not pretend to know :) Some fun facts: the temperature inside a collision is about a trillion degrees that's hotter than the center of the sun. It takes about 15 megawatts of electricity to run refrigerators to cool this thing down.

In Richard Posner's new book featured at slate.com he tries to calculate the cost of an event that even particle physicists say has a probability of happening so low it's nil. In theory there is the possibility that atomic particles colliding in the collider can reassemble itself and compressed itself into a strangelet and this thing can consume all matter it encounters. In Posner's book according to the slate.com review (I would like to read the book sometime) he estimates the cost of losing all of humanity at $600 trillion. Time to buy insurance? Nah, but it's a good plot for the next Bond movie: 007: No More Tomorrows. Anthony Hopkins can play the evil physicist hell bent on world domination :)