Colloquium – Joe Kapusta

Joseph Kapusta, University of Minnesota

Accelerator Disaster Scenarios, the Unabomber, and Scientific Risks

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 National 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.

Bio: Joseph (Joe) Kapusta is Professor of Physics and Distinguished University Teaching Professor at the University of Minnesota.   He does theoretical research on the properties of matter and radiation at high energy-density using relativistic quantum field theory, with applications to high energy nuclear collisions, neutron stars, and the early universe.  He is the Chief Editor of Physical Review C and a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

September 18, 2025 @ 4:10pm (CST) in 4327 Stevenson Center; light refreshments available at 3:50 PM

Host: J-F Paquet