Abstract
A giant magnet at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Long Island.
Talk about environmental impact!
Millennial nail-biting and end-of-the-world scenarios are popular right now, but at least one doomsday script was set aside for good this summer. Nostradamus's prediction that the world would end (estimated to occur on July 4, 1999) turned out to mark nothing other than a blessed end to some peculiar 450-year-old prognostications.
Still, for every doomsday scenario that is abandoned, another one is waiting in the wings. So it should be no surprise that as soon as Nostradamus was put down, Jonathan Leake, the science editor of the Sunday Times of London, called attention to a newer and relatively sophisticated threat of total destruction. Leake explained in the July 18 Times that a lot of upscale fretting was going on in the letters column of the July Scientific American about the possibility that something really, really bad might happen when Brook-haven National Laboratory on Long Island revved up its new $500 million Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider.
“I suppose we should have seen this coming.”
The collider, or “RHIC,” which has been eight years in the making, will begin to recreate conditions thought to exist at the birth of the universe. Testing will begin in the fall. Using giant magnets, two beams of “heavy” ions will be sent speeding around two 2.5-mile underground tubes until they reach 99.995 percent the speed of light–about 186,000 miles a second. Then they will smash into each other at a temperature about 10,000 times hotter than the sun. The ions of choice will be gold, one of the heaviest elements available. As the RHIC's web site explains, gold was chosen because its nucleus is simply packed with particles.
These head-on meetings of heavy ions are expected to result in a number of different–and strange–events. The object of the collisions is to produce conditions believed to have existed in the early post-Big Bang period, when quarks and gluons were supposed to have floated freely in a plasma. As the universe cooled and expanded, they are said to have bonded together, creating a relatively stable (13 billion years and counting) mixture of the neutrons and protons we are more familiar with today.
Sen. Jesse Helms's attempt at humor regarding his objections to the test ban treaty, in a letter to Sen. Byron Dorgan, June 26, 1999.
Some of the quarks to be created could be unusual–odd particles that some scientists dub “strangelets.” Leake reported that there was some concern that these “strange quarks” might have unknown properties that could lead to the destruction of the earth. (Writing in the July Scientific American, Frank Wilczek of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton suggested thinking about them as analogous to “Ice-9,” the earth-destroying substance in Kurt Von-negut's novel, Cat's Cradle.)
Also worrisome, wrote Leake, was the possibility that the collision of a proton and an antiproton might somehow lead to the creation of a mini-black hole that could expand to engulf the entire earth.
One of Scientific American's correspondents, Michael Cogill, suggested that this time physicists had gone too far. “What if they somehow alter the underlying nature of things?” he asked. But Walter Wagner, another letter writer, was more to the point in his concern about mini-black holes. If a mini-black hole could somehow absorb a large enough mass before exploding, he fretted, it would continue to grow. And, “if this happened on earth, the mini-black hole would be drawn by gravity toward the center of the planet, absorbing matter along the way and devouring the entire planet within minutes,” he wrote.
J. T. Thornton confounded his fellow academics by publishing after he perished.
Wagner added by way of reassurance that he had calculated that the Brook-haven collider would not “obtain enough energy” to produce a black hole. But, he also added, “my calculations might be wrong.”
Although few in the United States seemed to care very much, the British were taking strange matter pretty seriously. The Times's article certainly had an attention-grabbing headline: “Big Bang Machine Could Destroy Earth.” Science editor Leake also reported that the folks at Brookhaven were apparently sensitive enough about the issue that the lab's director, John Marburger, decided to convene a committee of physicists to take another look at the project to try to predict whether it could go as disastrously wrong as others seemed to think.
A couple of committee members were relatively open minded about the dangers. Bob Jaffe, director of MIT's Center for Theoretical Physics, told Leake that “the risk is exceedingly small, but the probability of something unusual happening is not zero.” And John Nelson of Birmingham University, who heads a British team working at the RHIC, said, “It is astonishingly unlikely that there is any risk–but I couldn't prove it.”
Still, Marburger, Brook-haven's director, was certain the committee would ultimately find the RHIC experiments to be safe. By July 22, the BBC was reassuring the British public that it was “Not the End of the World,” as BBC Online Science Editor David White-house wrote. Based on new comments by Marburger, Whitehouse concluded there was “no chance” that the RHIC's experiments would lead to the end of the world.
After all, Marburger pointed out, the amount of matter involved in the collisions at the RHIC would be minuscule–involving only a single pair of nuclei in each collision. The universe, he said, “would have to be extremely unstable in order for such a small amount of energy to cause a large effect.” Instead, it “appears to be quite stable against larger amounts of energy that occur in astrophysical processes.” He also pointed out that the collisions in the RHIC are well within the spectrum of energies that occur naturally in the cosmic radiation that constantly strikes the Earth.
Then, too, as Princeton's Wilczek wrote in Scientific American, physicists have some sensitivity to the possibility that they may “unwittingly trigger a catastrophe.” For instance, some members of the Manhattan Project went to Enrico Fermi with their concern that a nuclear explosion might ignite the atmosphere. (Some of us non-physicists must point out, however, that the concern was not so great that they canceled the Trinity test.)
Whitehouse also recounted that colliders have frequently been regarded as even more dangerous than atomic or thermonuclear blasts. In the 1970s, Yakob Zeldovich–a prominent physicist and one of the leading lights of the Soviet nuclear weapons program–became concerned that experiments to be undertaken at CERN, the European high-energy laboratory in Switzerland, might result in disaster. More recently, in 1995, protesters at Fermi-lab outside Chicago, described the Tevatron and its new Main Injector as “Home of the Next Supernova.”
While all the ruckus was going on, a peek at RHIC's web site showed that the end of the world was just so much more hot air to the lab. As of early August, the most recent news item listed on the site dated back to last April.
–Linda Rothstein
About 22 million military veterans and civilians worked for the Pentagon between September 2, 1945 and December 26, 1991. And each and every one of them is now eligible to receive a “certificate of recognition” from the Defense Department for having won the Cold War.
Since its debut in April, 200,000 people have applied for the Cold War Veteran Recognition Certificate. Louis Valverde, a Korean War veteran who received his award in June, explained: “People in the United States don't realize, probably because a [nuclear] bomb was never dropped on this country, how big [the Cold War] was” (Philadelphia Inquirer, July 18). For those interested in applying for the certificate, the army's Cold War Recognition web page is coldwar.army.mil.
Not to be outdone, Sen. Phil Gramm, a veteran Cold Warrior, recently sponsored legislation that would create the Cold War Victory Medal for the estimated 17 million veterans who served during the era. Gramm, whose medal proposal was attached to the Senate s defense authorization bill, also wants to designate November 9 as Victory in the Cold War Day. The price tag for the medal and victory celebration would be about $15 million.
Not every veteran, however, is impressed by Cold War awards and medals. Nebra Peters, a Veterans Services Office employee, told the Abilene Reporter (April 20), “I served for 22 years and I received each of the awards and decorations to which I was entitled. If they want to give me something else, they can give more money to the Veterans Administration so every veteran can get the help they need and deserve.”
For those Americans who do not qualify for the certificate but still feel they deserve recognition, several private companies will sell them unofficial Cold War decorations. A Virginia-based company, Foxfall Medals, is offering its own version of the Cold War Medal for anyone willing to fork over $24.95. According to the company's web page (www.foxfall.com/cwm.htm), the medal “is intended for use by State Guard organizations, military and patriotic societies, and by private citizens who served during the Cold War. [The medal] offers a unique form of recognition specifically for citizen-soldiers and federal civilian employees.”
“Hi! We've come home to roost.”
Fallout Products of Truckee, California, offers commemorative medals for “Cold War veterans who lived for over 40 years with thermonuclear anxiety.” The company claims that its Cold War Star and Cold War Campaign Medallion are made from scrap metal salvaged from dismantled Russian SS-11 missiles. According to the company's web page (www.falloutproducts.com), “Fallout Products hopes that these unique and attractive medals will bring you a mutually assured sense of closure and irony to an event of major historical significance.” Best of all, the medals are free for all “Cold War survivors,” except for a $16 fee “to cover fueling and launch.”
–Michael Flynn
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The Bulletin is sometimes accused of being a fusty old magazine, and one of the proofs offered by its critics is the use of the term “atomic scientists” in the title. Well, “scientists” may be hopelessly outré, but “atomic” is apparently making something of a comeback, judging by the inaugural Summer 1999 issue of Atomic, whose subtitle is “Living in the Age of Cool.” Atomicmag.com, the new magazine's web site, describes it as “the essential guide to retro culture,” and the “number one resource for hepsters, cool cats, lindy-hoppers, and lounge lizards alike.” At the Bulletin, we're so old we're new again.
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Although it was much reviled as a nest of evildoers, the Stasi–East Germany's ubiquitous spy agency–lives on. That is, its no-longer-secret files do. According to This Week in Germany (July 16, 1999), the agency that manages the Stasi's famously massive records–Der Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staassicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen DDR–is still averaging 400 requests a day from citizens who want to check out what the Stasi had to say about them. Since 1990, 1.6 million people have asked the agency for their files and another 2.7 million contacts have involved requests for background checks. The agency's retiring head, Joachim Gauck, says interest in the files continues to be far greater than expected.
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New Scientist (July 3, 1999) reports that the licensing agreement for Netscape Navigator, a web browser, includes the following warning: “This Software is not fault tolerant, and is not designed, manufactured, or intended for use or resale as on-line control equipment in hazardous environments requiring fail-safe performance, such as in the operation of nuclear facilities, aircraft navigation, or communication systems, air traffic control, direct life support machines, or weapons systems, in which the failure of the Software could lead directly to death, personal injury, or severe physical or environmental damage.”
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According to the General Accounting Office, between 1996 and 1998 the United States Navy “lost” more than $3 billion worth of goods–tasty items like guided missile launchers and night vision equipment. One reason the diversion of these goodies went unnoticed, says William J. Lynn III, the Defense Department's comptroller, is that the department has been using more than 330 separate accounting systems to keep track of its possessions. In April, Lynn told a Senate subcommittee that he is working hard to reduce that number to 32.
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As part of a British Treasury Department initiative, every government department in Britain has been engaged in an elaborate audit to establish its exact assets and liabilities. The Ministry of Defence, for example, had to recruit an extra 100 accountants to help it complete the task (London Sunday Telegraph, June 27, 1999). Two of the accounting team's conclusions: that Defence's assets totaled about £95 billion, and its liabilities included a tab of at least £10 billion for the eventual cleanup of the department's nuclear submarines and assorted nuclear warheads. With typical British understatement, Colin Balmer, Defence's director of finance, explained, “We found that the value of our assets was rather less than we had expected and the amounts of our liabilities, such as the nuclear legacy, rather more.”
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Last spring Americans learned that a favorite activity of mass-murdering Colorado schoolboys was playing Doom, a video game that offers the opportunity to simulate the bloody killing of one attacking demon after another. On the other hand, Americans can rest assured that good guys like the U.S. Marines aren't into monster-oriented games like that. Nope. They play Marine Doom instead–a Marine Corps-modified version of Doom II that features the simulated killing of one Nazi-like soldier after another with M-16 rifles. As reported by Kara Platoni in the Progressive (July 1998), the Corps even released a downloadable copy of the game over the Internet. (www.gamerx.com)
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While fighting the war in Kosovo, the United States and its NATO allies used 240,000 barrels of jet fuel a day, adding about five percent to world demand. When the war ended, the U.S. Defense Department's Energy Support Center said it had ordered too much and canceled orders for another 58.6 million gallons (Wall Street Journal, July 13, 1999). To put the amount of unneeded fuel in perspective, though: Had it been good old unleaded gas, it could have powered America's cars for less than six hours. According to the August 8 issue of In These Times, U.S. cars consume 3,000 gallons of gas a second.
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Because the U.S. government is determined to root out the spies it believes are lurking in the Energy Department, thousands of employees may be required to take polygraph or “lie detector” tests. But the trouble with using polygraphs in the workplace is that, like the inexpensive urine tests used to uncover drug use, they're not very accurate–raising the issue of how many “false positives” society should tolerate. Many drug testing programs already produce far more false positives than actual positives. Similarly, polygraph tests could result in workers in sensitive positions at the nuclear weapons labs, and especially weapons designers, being suspected of illegal behavior. Lab employees worry that in an effort to uncover one or fewer spies, the expected minimum rate of false positives–two percent–will result in 100 of 5,000 employees being falsely accused. According to the Albuquerque Journal (July 20, 1999), angry workers at Los Alamos are already petitioning against the tests and, for the first time in history, looking into unionizing as a way to guarantee their rights.
Nano nukes for micromachines?
Sandia's micromechanical (MEM) locking device fits on the head of a pin but can still prevent unauthorized access to a computer. Shown here is a 24-bit “maze,” which can only be traversed forward. Unauthorized users cannot go back if they make a mistake. (www.mdl.sandia.gov/micromachine)
Computers grow smaller each year. Portions of food at fine restaurants likewise. Even the U.S. deficit is shrinking. So why not that die-hard of the industrial age, the machine?
We're not talking a little smaller, or even a lot smaller. As reported in the January/February Bulletin, researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have created tiny microelectro-mechanical systems, or MEMs, smaller than a grain of sand and capable of performing a variety of tasks. Some can spin wheels as small as .3 millimeters at 350,000 revolutions per minute. Others are equipped with mirrors or motors on the same scale.
One problem yet to be solved, however, is scaling down a suitable power supply. So far, no effective solution exists.
Not all MEM technology–also known as nanotechnology or micromechanics–needs power. The sensing devices used in automotive airbags, for example, just hang around waiting for something to happen mechanically. Other devices, however, require a jolt of power, and since even a hearing aid battery might be thousands of times larger than the machine itself, finding suitable power sources has turned into one of the biggest challenges faced by MEM designers.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin believe the answer lies in nuclear-powered batteries so small they could be lined up on a human hair. The Energy Department seems to agree, and in July it awarded the university a $450,000 grant to study the technology.
Although researchers elsewhere are looking into using fossil fuel or fuel cell technology to solve the MEM power issue, James Blanchard, an associate professor of nuclear engineering, believes the power density and longevity of radioactive materials–although he preferred not to mention which ones they plan to study–gives them an advantage over other potential sources.
The Wisconsin study will investigate ways of turning the natural decay of radioactive materials–either by directly harnessing the particles emitted from a radioactive source, or by using the heat they pro-duce–into electric current. In theory, the batteries could be similar to the fist-sized nuclear batteries used on some space missions. Blanchard's department plans to have prototypes sometime next year.
“If you have a device like a grain of sand, you obviously want a power source that gives you the most power output for the size of fuel. For that, you cannot get better than nuclear power. It has the best power density available,” Blanchard told The London Times.
But could the battery for a future surgical device or automobile monitoring system be a mini-Chernobyl waiting to happen?
Not a chance, Blanchard told the Bulletin. “We've been comparing the radiation level to that emitted by a smoke detector.” And since the batteries would not rely on nuclear fusion or fission, only decay, there's no chance of an explosion.
Once developed, the batteries still won't have enough juice to power even a small consumer device. The power output, Blanchard continued, “will be quite small–from microwatts to milliwatts, somewhere in that range–but we're turning small little gears so we don't need much power.”
There's a real need for these batteries, according to Paul McWhorter, deputy director for microsystems at Sandia National Laboratories. “One of the biggest challenges with these micromachines is building autonomous systems that are self-contained.
“Today, even if you have everything small, you still have two leads coming off for the power. The challenge is how to shrink the power source to a usable size,” he said.
But power sources don't scale down well since their output is primarily a function of volume. Nuclear materials, on the other hand, have the high energy density needed at small sizes, although McWhorter wondered if the public is ready to have small bits of radioactive materials spread throughout their microsystems. Even though the amount is minuscule, it would still take “lots of education before the public is ready for nuclear batteries,” he said.
“I was a 24-hour virus, but thanks to antibiotics, I'm now a 48-hour virus.”
The benefits could be enormous. “The real power is that we can make very complex systems at a very low cost,” he said. For example, a micromechanical system that costs tens of thousands of dollars to manufacture conventionally might only cost a dollar or two when manufactured as a MEM, which is created much the same way as a microchip. However, instead of forming the silicon into millions of transistors, as you would with a computer microchip, MEM technology allows you to create gears, motors, mirrors, and other parts that can move.
Developing a practical power supply for all these MEMs “is a really interesting and relevant area of research,” McWhorter concluded. “You're going against some very fundamental scaling laws. It's like running a truck with a rubber band, so this research is a real need for a very tough problem.”
But the lack of micro-sized power sources hasn't stopped the spread of MEM technology. According to McWhorter, current MEM devices are found most often in inertial measurement chips that measure motion and position.
“In effect it is a chip that knows where it is,” he said, and you'll find them in automotive airbags and sensors as well as computer input devices, especially gaming controllers.
Many high-end video projection systems also have a MEMs chip at their heart, such as the one made by Texas Instruments that sports a million fluctuating mirrors to project an image on a screen. Even the little device in an inkjet printer that spits ink onto a page is a micromachined device, McWhorter noted, “so most people already own micromachines and don't know it.”
In the same way that the integrated circuit industry has replaced costly printed circuit boards with inexpensive microchips, McWhorter believes that MEM technology is the next step in the silicon revolution, one that will not only allow chips to “think,” but also to “sense, act, and communicate.” Recent studies by Systems Planning Corporation, according to information provided on Sandia's web site, estimates the market for intelligent micromachine-based systems to be around $100 billion a year.
Another advantage of MEMs is that at the micro level a different set of physics applies to moving objects, said Bill Trimmer, president of Belle Mead Research. Although surface forces such as friction and electrostatics loom large–and are a main obstacle faced by researchers–gravity and inertia are no longer significant. Consider how an ant can carry several times its own weight, or how a water bug can walk on water, and the physics of the micro world begin to come into focus.
“As things become smaller their mass decreases dramatically,” he said, “so small things tend to be very robust.”
“The applications are really exploding,” he said. “Many are still being worked on, but soon we'll be seeing them everywhere.
“Take endoscopic and laparoscopic surgery,” he noted, describing a MEM system that could be inserted into a patient through a biopsy needle or tiny incision and that would allow a surgeon to get tactile feedback from inside the patient's body.
“And just imagine the applications for information-gathering,” he said. “You would be able to have bugs smaller than a bug.”
–Bret Lortie
Had nuclear doomsday come during the Cold War, the BBC had 100 days of programming stored up, ready to be broadcast by a network of underground radio stations.
According to the July 11, 1999 Sunday Times of London, the “Beeb” did not abandon the special underground facilities–complete with food supplies, bunkbeds, and even ping-pong tables–until 1993.
Peter Donaldson, chief announcer for Radio 4, was the official “voice of doom,” who prerecorded the warning of impending nuclear attack, which would have been broadcast at the appropriate time on all of the BBC's radio and television stations. The alert also featured ominous “Dalek music” (from the BBC's long-running science fiction series, Dr. Who).
An outside observer might think that Dalek music could make the announcement of nuclear attack seen unreal, but apparently making all the musical selections for post-nuclear-exchange Britain was tricky:
“The national anthem was deemed too solemn, the disco hit, ‘Stayin’ Alive’ rejected for being too frivolous,” writes Times correspondent, Nicholas Hellen. On the other hand, Julie Andrews, in the Sound of Music, was judged just right.
Stanley Kubrick might have found it ironic that Vera Lynne's “We'll Meet Again” (heard during the explosive ending of Dr. Strangelove), was also included among the musical selections, but Lynne told Hellen she was delighted to learn that the song had been “chosen ahead of all the pop songs that went in between.”
–L. R.
WEB Watch
Boss not looking? The seriousness of international affairs got you down? Just turn to the web for a few moments of stolen pleasure.
In case you were thinking the CIA was an adults-only club, our nation's top security organization now has a kid-safe face, and it's fun for adults too.
At the agency's Kids Page, impressionable minds can learn about American intelligence-gathering in comfortingly vague terms. Cat got your tongue when it comes to our national appetite for intelligence? Try explaining it the CIA way: “There is information that other countries will not share with the United States, called secrets.” Shame on those rogue states for not wanting to share their national secrets.
Even our founding father, George Washington, gets to put in his two cents on the History Page: “We would often give the enemy false information, and we were so good at it, they believed us!”
No kid site would be complete without a few requisite games, so there's also the Try A Disguise game and a genuinely challenging geography quiz. And if you haven't had your fill of cute Barbie and Ken agent-look-a-likes, you can also take a tour from the site's cartoon guides Harry and Aeriel Recon, the CIA's own reconnaissance photography pigeons.
–Ken Burns
Play the game that showed a generation why National Missile Defense won't work. It's Missile Commando, an interpretation of a familiar arcade classic, available on your Java-capable web browser.
The general idea, of course, is to stop the bombs before they destroy your cities. But as with the original game, after a while you'll be forced to sacrifice most of your cities in a last-ditch effort to hang onto just one–maybe Cleveland, or Vladivostok if you prefer.
–K. B.
www.ida.liu.se/~her/npp/demo.html
Sit in the hot seat of a nuclear power plant control room and enjoy the thrill of an impending nuclear meltdown at Henrik Eriksson's interactive, Java-based simulation of a nuclear reactor. Argonne physicist George Stanford assures the Bulletin that the site is an “amusing little demonstration” that faithfully incorporates basic reactor elements.
As the site's “Kärnobyl” reactor begins to fail, you can attempt to keep the reactor stable by manipulating various valves, turbines, and pumps. When, for instance, a cooling pump fails, try closing the corresponding valve before the reactor tank empties and the core is exposed.
Inevitably, the plant melts down unless you “scram” the reactor core by inserting the moderator bars. And if you're worried about a potential catastrophe at a reactor near you, the site also has a “Preparing for Disaster” link, which takes you to a page with links to a variety of industry, activist, and government sites.
–M. F.