Ice-9 Type Transition

[302efi]

Thoughts on Strange Matter having positively charged atomic nuclei and "eating" the world from a particle accelerator experiment accident ?

 

[silverpig]

Huh? More details...

And normal matter already has positively charged nuclei.

 

[302efi]

Well a Ice-9 Type Transition is theoretical result of Strange Matter being formed and multiplying outta control inside a particle accelerator.

Pretty much our planet being consumed by Stange Matter.


I'm surprised no one on heres heard of this...

 

[HOOfan 1]

I am guessing this term stems from Kurt Vonnegut's book Cat's Cradle where a pellet was developed that would turn water into ice at any temperature and ended up turning all of the world's water to ice...The pellet being called "Ice 9"

 

[Howard]

Who'd have thought protons were positively charged?

 

[Born2bwire]

Never heard of such thing outside the ravings of science fiction.

 

[silverpig]

Strange quarks decay... they don't turn other stuff into strange quarks.

 

[thereaderrabbit]

FYI- an "Ice-9 Type Transition" is not possible with anything such as water. To go from a liquid to a solid you must take heat out of the system. Doing so would dump heat into the surroundings. As more ice-9 were formed with water the temperature of the surroundings would continue to increase until a temperature is reached at which ice-9 melts (as it can do in Vonnegut's book). Once this size is reached the system will reach a quasi-equilibrium state. The higher boiling point of ice-9 would suggest an absolutely massive amount of heat dissipation would be required to propagate ice-9.

 

[RaynorWolfcastle]

I vaguely remember my intro to quantum mech prof saying something about this. You'll have to excuse the vagueness, this was a while ago and I'm not a physicist: I think that the end of the story was that there was some particle that could, upon contact with other particles, change them to have the same properties as itself, so that in theory it would be possible to cause a chain reaction that would convert everything to that type of particle. In reality, the decay time of that particle was so minuscule that the odds of a chain reaction actually occurring were essentially nil. Again, I'm a bit hazy on the details but I definitely remember him saying something along those lines.

 

[302efi]

RaynorWolfcastle thats exactly what I'm talking about

 

[DrPizza]

Originally posted by: Born2bwire
Never heard of such thing outside the ravings of science fiction.

There are all sorts of things that don't exist in nature, but are created every day in particle accelerators. However, IIRC, strangelets were one of the top 10 most feasible ways to destroy the earth. a repeat, but enjoyable reading

(Note: we pathetic humans are not capable of destroying the earth, no matter how big our collective ego. We can make it uninhabitable for us... but we can't destroy it.)


Also, since we're mentioning strange stuff, I was just reading the other day that they finally created positronium in a lab: a nucleus-less "atom" consisting of an electron and a positron.

 

[Born2bwire]

Originally posted by: DrPizza

Originally posted by: Born2bwire
Never heard of such thing outside the ravings of science fiction.

There are all sorts of things that don't exist in nature, but are created every day in particle accelerators. However, IIRC, strangelets were one of the top 10 most feasible ways to destroy the earth. a repeat, but enjoyable reading

(Note: we pathetic humans are not capable of destroying the earth, no matter how big our collective ego. We can make it uninhabitable for us... but we can't destroy it.)


Also, since we're mentioning strange stuff, I was just reading the other day that they finally created positronium in a lab: a nucleus-less "atom" consisting of an electron and a positron.

I remember that now. Fun article.

 

[1prophet]

Originally posted by: 302efi
Thoughts on Strange Matter having positively charged atomic nuclei and "eating" the world from a particle accelerator experiment accident ?

Believe it or not the news carried such a story about that possibility happening at Brookhaven National Laboratory on the eastern end of Long Island, New York.

Washington -- Brookhaven National Laboratory officials knew things were
getting out of hand on Monday when they got a call from a reporter for
an
online news service asking - apparently not in jest - whether the lab's
new
ion collider could have created a black hole that swallowed the plane of
John F. Kennedy Jr. as it flew past Long Island.
Physicists long have been accustomed to reassuring anxious residents
that their latest research machines are not going to destroy the world.
But frustrated Brookhaven lab officials are prepared for a new
flurry
of attention in the wake of a piece over the weekend in The Sunday Times
of
London suggesting the lab's new Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider could
create some sort of runaway, catastrophic reaction involving
hypothetical
particles called ''strangelets.''
The Times' understated headline: ''Big Bang Machine Could Destroy
Earth.''
The problem, according to physicists at Brookhaven and elsewhere,
is
that the possibilities discussed in the Times piece - which is now being
circulated widely on the Internet - have been examined and dismissed by
specialists as not plausible.
Robert Jaffe, director of the Center for Theoretical Physics at
Massachusetts Institute Technology in Cambridge, Mass. and a developer
of
strangelet theory, said the chances a stable strangelet could even be
produced in the Brookhaven collider ''are about the same order [of
possibility] as if I were to win the lottery.''
In turn, the notion that such a particle would pose any catastrophic
risk to the planet is ''preposterous,'' Jaffe said. It is ''unlikely to
the
level of the most absurd thing you could imagine,'' he said. ''It's more
likely that a spaceship is going to land in the middle of Texas, and
that
aliens are going to come out and tell us that the New York Yankees are
all
aliens.''
The Sunday Times said Brookhaven director John Marburger had set up
a
committee of physicists last week ''to investigate whether the project
could go disastrously wrong.'' But Marburger says that he had decided
several weeks ago to ask a few leading physicists to write a ''white
paper'' about the proposed science at the new ion collider and why some
of
the wilder speculation about what could happen in the machine was not
credible.
There had been a letter recently to Scientific American magazine,
for
example, asking whether the Brookhaven machine could, in theory, create
a
mini black hole - a superdense region of gravitational collapse where
even
light waves cannot escape.
Such questions arise because the collider - which circulated its
first
beam of ions on Friday - is meant to briefly re-create, on a very small
scale, conditions similar to the superdense state of matter believed to
have existed just after the Big Bang. Jaffe said the collision energies
to
be created in the Brookhaven machine, however, are vastly less - by
about
17 orders of magnitude - than those associated with any gravitational
effects in quantum physics.
As for strangelets, those hypothetical particles would be a rare
form
of nuclear matter composed of building blocks called ''strange'' quarks.
Normal matter, such as protons and neutrons, are made of ''up'' and
''down'' quarks. Some theorists believe strangelets may exist, under
extreme pressure, at the cores of neutron stars.
All searches for hints of them elsewhere, including in normal
environments on Earth or in previous particle accelerator experiments,
have
proved fruitless, Jaffe said. And even if a strangelet did exist, he
argues, it would not cannibalize normal matter in its neighborhood
because
the atoms in that matter would be protected by their surrounding swarm
of
electrons.
Frank Wilczek, a theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton, N.J., responding to a letter in Scientific American, wrote
that
strangelets ''if they exist, at all, are not aggressive, and they will
start out very, very small.'' For strangelets, as with mini black holes,
he
says, ''a doomsday scenario is not plausible.''
Marburger, a physicist, and other specialists say the most
convincing
argument against a strangelet catastrophe is empirical. For billions of
years, cosmic rays - which penetrate our atmosphere constantly - have
been
producing energetic events comparable to those envisioned in the
Brookhaven
machine. No strangelets have formed and proceeded to gobble up our
world.
''The best evidence that it can't happen is that it hasn't
happened,''
said Willam Zajc, a Columbia University physicist.
''The idea that scares people is that you are creating an
environment
[in the collider] that never before has been created,'' MIT's Jaffe
said.
''The answer is it has been created a lot of times before in cosmic
rays.''
Scott Cullen, legal coordinator for Standing for Truth About
Radiation,
an activist group that's been critical of the laboratory's environmental
record, said he was surpised when he first read The Sunday Times piece.
''I wondered if it was some kind of hoax, really,'' Cullen said. But
he
said local residents have been calling with questions and concerns about
it
so community activists will seek a meeting with Brookhaven officials
''to
learn more about this.''
Brookhaven's recent difficulties on the environmental front have
fostered a sense of distrust and suspicion among residents, Cullen said,
and many are unwilling to discount anything they read about the lab.

 

[Nurn]

"...the New York Yankees are all aliens.''

OMG, I knew it!

 

[jagec]

I admit I don't know what's special about the ice-9 transition. In the P & T regime we deal with, we only see Ices 6 and 7. But neither of those have destroyed the earth yet.