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From: kort@hounx.UUCP (B.KORT)
Newsgroups: net.physics,net.sci
Subject: What's All This, Then (Workshop on Exploding Particle Accelerators)
Message-ID: <572@hounx.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 4-Feb-86 19:58:51 EST
Article-I.D.: hounx.572
Posted: Tue Feb  4 19:58:51 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 5-Feb-86 04:59:54 EST
Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Holmdel NJ
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Xref: watmath net.physics:3822 net.sci:509

The current issue of Smithsonian has a guest column on modern-day worries
by Richard Wolkomir.  The author picks up a nasty new macroworry:

	...physicists Piet Hut and Martin J. Rees, of the Institute
	for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey, have dreamed
	up a beauty.  They have a notion that new particle accelerators
	may create subatomic collisions intense enough to trigger a
	chain reaction and thus vaporize the entire Universe!

		Such a macroworry is exquisite.  While we stand by,
	physicists are planning giant accelerators.  A scientist in
	a white smock will soon throw that switch.  And for thousands
	of people the last thought before the cosmos winks out, is
	sure to be, "Darn, why didn't I start a petition?"

Anybody heard about this theory?  It all sounds a bit preposterous,
but then much of modern physics is weird, as one poster recently
observed.  Do I have time to have a little fun in life before we
blow it?

--Barry Kort