Rebuttal to Letter in Scientific American

Editors:

The following is my rebuttal to the letter of Frank Wilczek in your July, '99 issue:

Man-made disasters have always been preceded by an excessive degree of arrogance on the part of the persons involved. The Titanic and Hindenberg disasters of earlier generations, and the Apollo launch-pad fire and Challenger disasters of our generation, all involved large numbers of scientists and engineers dedicated to the success of their project. In each such disaster, a key factor was overlooked or ignored, leading to deadly consequences.
As I indicated, my calculations involving Hawking's formula for computing the half-life of a miniature black-hole resulted in a time which was so short (about 10^(-50) seconds) that any such black-hole would not have time to merge with other matter, before exploding in a shower of particles. Contrary to Frank Wilczek's assertion regarding gravitational field strength, Hawking's formula does not set a minimum mass. Rather, as the mass decreases, the half-life decreases as the cube of the mass-decrease.
My query was to learn if anyone else had pondered on the problem, and knew of any factors which might serve to extend the half-life. I could think of none.
Also contrary to Frank Wilczek's assertion, "strangelets" are a major theoretical problem at Brookhaven, and even if starting out very small (which theory shows they should), could prove quite aggressive by an overlooked mechanism.
Normally atoms do not spontaneously fuse. Even atoms such as a deuterium-tritium (d-t) combination, which has an energy-well release of some 25 Mev/fusion, do not spontaneously fuse. That is because of the 'coulomb barrier' keeping the nuclei at a safe distance apart. One notable exception, however, was detected some twenty years ago by researchers at BYU, who found that by heating a d-t combination to high temperature, and introducing a mu meson (muon) into the system, they were able to force about 150 fusions/muon during the lifetime of the muon (a few microseconds). Apparently, the combination of the shrinkage of the covalent bond bringing the two nuclei closer together, and the high temperature causing the nuclei to oscillate within their bond, brought the nuclei close enough together that a sizable percentage of the d-t molecules underwent a spontaneous quantum-tunneling fusion.
"Strangelets," which have energy-wells for fusion many times larger than does d-t fusion, might very well be able to undergo spontaneous tunneling fusion at an appreciable rate, without the necessity of muons being present. Should this take place in the liquid Helium bath cooling the super-conducting magnets, a strangelet might grow to an appreciable size. The larger a strangelet becomes (unlike normal nuclei which have coulombic repulsion causing nuclear instability with increasing size), the more stable it becomes and the deeper is its energy-well for fusion.
Finally, Frank Wilczek seems to have overlooked a fundamental principle of physics. While admittedly cosmic rays have energies measured which exceed the 40,000 GeV of the RHIC, it is the center-of-momentum (COM) energy which is the fundamental criteria, not the earth-reference-frame energy. That is the very reason for building colliders, rather than fixed-target accelerators. An incoming cosmic ray, in order to mimic the RHIC, would be required to have about 4,000,000 GeV, which would produce a COM energy of about 40,000 GeV, the same as the RHIC COM energy. Reports of such cosmic rays are exceedingly rare, and have extremely wide error-bars, with the error-bars always dipping well-below the 4,000,000 GeV value for high-altitude detectors. The few reports of higher energies for earth-based detectors are potentially explainable as having been caused by the break-up of exotic particles (the rest-mass converted into a shower of fundamental particles) high in the atmosphere, rather than by ordinary cosmic rays.
Moreover, such cosmic rays never impact anywhere near the vicinity of a liquid-helium growing-ground, which strangelets would probably initially need in order to become aggressive.

Walter L. Wagner

Richard dot J dot Wagner at gmail dot com