Yeah, I'm not usually one to subscribe to all this end-of-world bullshit so I'm gonna assume these guys know what they're doing. To my unenlightened eyes, that does seem just a tad risky, though...
Nah, not really. The reaction is so brief and tiny that the odds of it turning into something a human being could notice without technological assistance are, literally, astronomical.
It seems a bit risky until you remember that they are creating a plasma from only two gold nuclei, while a cube that size would contain trillions.
Literally. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. [/petpeeve] [/inigo] But yeah, that's nothing to worry about.
Actually, strong force parity violation has been observed before, but nobody's managed to make it stick. Usually it turns out to be some unexpected artifact of trigger/cut/phase space selection. In this case, the experiment hasn't even managed to parse out whether it's a nuclear physics effect as opposed to evidence of a genuine parity violating term in the strong force Lagrangian. It's interesting, but there's plenty of healthy skepticism about it all so far.
