Accelerator Disaster Scenarios, the Unabomber, and Scientific Risks

TL;DR

This paper reviews historical scientific disaster scenarios related to high-energy accelerators, discusses public fears and media coverage, and advocates for improved communication to address genuine risks effectively.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of past accelerator disaster fears, their societal impact, and proposes strategies for better scientist-public communication to manage scientific risks.

Findings

Public fears often stem from miscommunication and sensationalism.

Improved dialogue can reduce unreasonable fears and focus on real threats.

Historical cases highlight the importance of transparent risk assessment.

Abstract

The possibility that experiments at high-energy accelerators could create new forms of matter that would ultimately destroy the Earth has been considered several times in the past quarter century. One consequence of the earliest of these disaster scenarios was that the authors of a 1993 article in "Physics Today" who reviewed the experiments that had been carried out at the Bevalac at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory were placed on the FBI's Unabomber watch list. Later, concerns that experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory might create mini black holes or nuggets of stable strange quark matter resulted in a flurry of articles in the popular press. I discuss this history, as well as Richard A. Posner's provocative analysis and recommendations on how to deal with such scientific risks. I conclude that better communication between scientists and nonscientists would serve to assuage unreasonable fears and focus attention on truly serious potential threats to humankind.