New World

Scientists have quashed suggestions that a £350m experiment planned for the autumn could cause the destruction of the Earth. There is no chance of the atom-smashing experiment causing a disaster, such as a black hole would devour the entire Earth. Researchers have spent eight years constructing the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island in New York State. Its goal is to smash the nuclei of atoms together and study their wreckage to determine the fundamental properties of matter.

RHIC takes atoms of gold and swings them around two 3.8 kilometer (2.4 miles) circular tubes where powerful magnets accelerate them to almost the speed of light. When they collide, they do so in minute. Heat caused by the Collisions could be 10,000 times hotter than the Sun. Scientists hope to create quark-gluon plasma, a fundamental state of matter that probably has not existed naturally in the Universe since the Big Bang.