WHAT EXPERTS SAY
The following is a sworn affidavit filed in the U.S. District Court, Eastern District of New York, Walter L. Wagner v. Brookhaven Science Associates, LLC,Case No. 00CV1672 [2000]:
I, H. Kimball Hansen, Ph.D., declare under penalty of perjury as follows:
I am a Professor, emeritus, of astronomy in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. I was a member of the faculty there between 1963 and 1993, and from 1968 through 1991 I was also Associate-Editor of The Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.
I have read the First Amended Complaint, the Affidavits of Drs. Richard J. Wagner and Walter L. Wagner, the Safety Review[1] referenced therein, and the science article on strangelets by Joshua Holden, and am familiar with the issues therein with respect to operation of the RHIC.
I concur that the so-called 'supernova argument', used in the Safety Review to ostensibly show the safety of the RHIC, is wholly faulty. It presupposes the stability of small strangelets, with life-times on the order of centuries or longer, long enough to travel great distances through space. The authors had previously asserted, that to be dangerous, strangelets only needed to have lifetimes on the order of a billionth of a second, just long enough to travel a few centimeters and reach normal matter outside the vacuum of the RHIC.
There are a number of theoretical arguments that show that strangelets might be dangerous, and there are faults in the arguments presented, to date, to show the safety of the RHIC. I am of the opinion that it would be wise to avoid head-on collisions in the RHIC until a more thorough safety review, preferably before the physics community as a whole, has been obtained. However, the fixed-target mode of operation for the RHIC would be acceptable.
DATED: May 17, 2000
[signed]
H. Kimball Hansen, Ph.D.
[1] Review of Speculative "Disaster Scenarios" at RHIC