Recently in the popular media, there have been some questions about the safety of experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. This page contains links to some of these articles and to the official responses made by John Marburger, the director of Brookhaven National Laboratory. A letter to the editor appeared in the Davis Enterprise on Sunday, September 19, 1999, sparking a flurry of concerns by other Davis residents about the safety of RHIC. Our research group is actively involved in experiments at RHIC and some of our members sent a response to the Enterprise. That letter is also included here.
Letters to the Editor in Scientific American's July issue prompted the Sunday Times of London to publish an editorial about RHIC on July 18. John Marburger responded to this article in an official statement on July 19.
A technology writer at abcnews.com wrote an inflammatory piece on September 15 which prompted yet another response by John Marburger on September 17.
Apparently, the flood of email from scientists across the country surprised Fred Moody. A week later he addressed the many letters he received.
A local Davis resident sent a letter to the editor of the Davis Enterprise in response to the abcnews.com article, which was published September 19, 1999. Some members of the UCD NPG chose to respond on September 22. That response was published in the Enterprise on Sunday, September 26.
Some other articles recently brought to our attention:
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The following references were contributed via email from Richard
Cathcart on 21-May-2000: |
* A small error was made in the Washington Post article which
was corrected on September
14.
The correction wasn't quite correct however, as
a gamma boost of 100 really corresponds to 99.995% the speed of
light, but perhaps that's splitting hairs...
Pete Genzer, of the BNL Office of Media and Communications sent us the email he has used to respond to the over 300 email messages received since the abcnews.com article appeared. In particular, it includes a response by Stephen Hawking to the claims about black hole formation:
In his ABCNEWS.COM article, Moody alleges that Stephen Hawking supports the idea that RHIC could be dangerous. To clarify Stephen Hawking's views, two of our physicists contacted Hawking at Cambridge yesterday (9/20). Here is what he said about the way his theory was described by David Melville and then applied to RHIC by Fred Moody: "I never said that. Long Island is quite safe."
The topic of RHIC safety was raised again in May 2005 by Horatiu Nastase (RHIC fireball as a dual black hole). Here are some statements from RHIC physicists: Dmitri Kharzeev, Peter Steinberg.
Finally, for the complete scientific report about the safety of RHIC, visit the BNL web pages. There is a press release by the office of media relations and a link to the full Jaffe report.