www.rhic.bnl.gov

Brookhaven National Laborabory - includes information on early results of the experiment and a good explanation of the project for non-scientists.

 

http://www.cebaf.gov

Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility - contains an informative and erntertaining "Kids Corner."

 

map.gsfc.nasa.gov/html/

big_bang.html

interesting ideas for space NASA's exploration of the Big Bang Theory from its theoretical foundations to testing for validity - includes useful links for further study.

Colonization of Mars

Molecular electronics

You've read about them in science fiction stories and watched them skulk about in horror movies: "mad scientists," driven by an uncontrolled passion to know the secrets of the universe, creating havoc and destruction for themselves and others. But what if well meaning, morally upright men and women of science unleashed incredible evil by accident? What if they set off a chain of events that led to the most dire of all consequences ­ the complete destruction of the universe?

Consider an experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, New York. In order to increase our understanding of the Big Bang, scientists will use the world's most powerful particle accelerator to fire gold ions through a magnetic switchyard. The ions will travel at 99.995 percent of the speed of light. The ion beams will emerge from the switchyard and travel into a relativistic heavy ion collider from opposite directions. The resulting collision will produce heat at temperatures reaching one trillion degrees K, about a million times hotter than the core of the sun!

The intense heat and high-pressure conditions of the collider will cause the protons and neutrons to melt into quarks and gluons and form plasma known as QGP. This is the "soup" that was thought to exist immediately after the Big Bang.

So what's the problem? Some scientists think that, at least in theory, the creation of QGP could trigger the formation of a type of subatomic particle called stragelets which "eats" all matter it encounters. This chain reaction would continue until all matter in the universe had been converted into strangelets.

The chances of such a catastrophic event actually occurring are extremely remote. But MIT physicist Bob Jaffe admits, "You never know."

Source: "Dr. Strangelet or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Big Bang." Wired, May, 2000, pp. 254-55.

PROBLEM SOLVING: Scientists, explorers, and pioneers have been taking extreme risks since the dawn of humanity. What makes a risk an "acceptable risk"? To quote the horror flicks, "Are there places man should not go?" Are there limits to scientific progress? Who should control high stakes science? Scientists? Governments? International agencies? Is scientific progress beyond control?

There are six types of quarks: up and down, top and bottom, charm and strange. Strangelets are a poorly understood subatomic particle.

The speed of light in a vacuum is roughly 186,000 miles per second.

The world's newest particle accelerator is located in Virginia. The Jefferson Lab in Newport News is jointly sponsored by the US Department of Energy,city of Newport News. Commonwealth of Virginia, and the US Congress.

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