Apocalypse now? not yet

Physicists have proved that the fears that the new Brookhaven collider could generate destructive particles, are unfounded. They have shown that the density at the very moment of the collision will be far less than what is required to produce a black hole (by a factor 1060). Another fear was the production of negative balls made up of strange quarks. This kind of quark ball would quickly grow up by absorbing any nearby positive nucleus. According to physicists this danger is not real because if such a strange quark cluster could exist, it would be necessarily positive and then harmless. (A.C.)