EpiStack

O-14 - The RHIC strangelet safety analysis ran five years before its anthropic-selection flaw was found and corrected

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Properties9
type
observation
id
O-14
statement
The cosmic-ray-based strangelet safety analysis (Dar, De Rújula et al. 1999) that was pivotal to the RHIC safety report contained an unnoticed flaw - it ignored anthropic observation-selection effects, so Earth's survival could not carry the evidential weight assigned to it - and the gap was only identified and corrected by Tegmark & Bostrom in 2005, after RHIC had operated for about five years.
generally_known
true
data_basis
—
source
S-44 - Ord, Hillerbrand and Sandberg, Probing the Improbable
locator
§4.1, final two ¶¶ (citing Tegmark & Bostrom 2005)
quote
it is significant that the RHIC had been running for five years on the strength of a flawed safety report, before Tegmark and Bostrom noticed and fixed this gap in the argument
link_state
linked

The corrected analysis (anthropic bias removed, using Jaffe et al. 2000 inputs plus a planetary-formation-rate model) still bounded accelerator risk below 1e-12/yr, but the episode is a documented instance of a serious flaw persisting undetected in exactly the class of physics safety argument at issue for the LHC. The paper also notes Kent (2004) found mistakes in how risk probabilities were stated across versions of the Dar et al. paper and the Brookhaven report.

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