在最近舉行的美國科學促進會會議上，石溪大學的Robert Crease談到了世界末日的恐慌，涉及《科學美國人》和RHIC。

At the recent AAAS meeting, Stony Brook University’s Robert Crease talked about a doomsday scare involving Scientific American and Brookhaven National Lab’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC:

“As the accelerator neared completion in 1999, Scientific American ran an article about RHIC, called ‘A Little Big Bang,’ with the title referring to the machine’s ambition to study forms of matter in the early universe.”

A reader wrote in wondering if black holes might be created. Sci Am printed the letter with a considered response from physicist Frank Wilczek.

“Wilzcek said that the black hole scenario was incredible. But he also said that there’s a more likely possibility that it might create strangelets, which would swallow ordinary matter and described that as [merely] not plausible. That then prompted a series of headlines including this from the Sunday Times of London, entitled ‘Big Bang Machine Could Destroy Earth’.”

Scientific American, Brookhaven and the Earth survived. Wilczek won the Nobel Prize in 2004 for his earlier work.

—Steve Mirsky

在最近舉行的美國科學促進會會議上，石溪大學的Robert Crease談到了世界末日的恐慌，涉及《科學美國人》和RHIC。

“1999年加速器接近完工，《科學美國人》發表了一篇關于RHIC的文章《小型大爆炸》，標題指出RHIC是用來研究早期宇宙物質形式的。”

一位讀者寫信詢問是否會產生黑洞。《科學美國人》刊發了這封信，并附帶了物理學家弗蘭克維爾澤克深思熟慮的一封回信。

Wilzcek說，產生黑洞的說法不可信。但healso說可能性更大的是可能會產生奇異夸克物質，它將吞下普通物質，他認為黑洞是不可能的。之后《倫敦星期日時報》發表一系列含有此類內容的的新聞摘要，標題為《大爆炸機會摧毀地球》。

科學美國人，美國國立brookhaven（布魯克海文）國家實驗室和地球還活著。維爾澤克由于早期的工作在2004年贏得了諾貝爾獎。