This is the kind of post I start reading, and I begin to furrow my eyebrows as phrases and sentences pop up that don’t seem right or are obviously wrong. I though it was just bad science journalism, but realized it’s a rant-y agenda piece, with the supposed “science” reporting as a setup.

Superfluids, BECs and Bosenovas: The Ultimate Experiment

It starts off OK, giving some history, but then there was

Bosons are force carriers like photons of light and fermions are the matter we can touch.

Force carriers are bosons, but not all bosons are force carriers (universal affirmatives can only be partially converted, quoth the logician) — you can construct bosonic systems from an even number of fermions. Bosons have integral spin angular momentum, and fermions have half-integral spin, and the statistics that describe their behavior is different. An attempt to bridge the gap between science and a lay explanation that fails because it’s scientifically incorrect.

[helium is] produced by nuclear decay, as from radium and polonium, dangerous alpha radiation releasing, in fact bare nuclei of helium that eventually pick up electrons and form stable helium isotopes.

Here’s a journalistic archaeologism (it’s certainly not neo-) dangerous radiation. Nuclear radiation in invariably dangerous. Actually alpha radiation is pretty much harmless as an external dose, as it deposits its energy in a very short distance, so it doesn’t tend to penetrate even a layer of dead skin. The source is dangerous when ingested or inhaled. But the Helium nucleus is already stable (it doesn’t decay) even before it picks up the electrons — that makes it electrically neutral, not stable.

Given an electric charge, helium can fluoresce like neon.

No. It will fluoresce if you excite it, which you can do electrically. But giving it a charge means adding or removing an electron.

BECs have been turned into atom lasers and BECs have produced bosenovas, an inexplicable phenomenon where BECs explode, releasing more than the energy present in the system and where about half of the BEC sample literally vanishes without a trace. Fascinating and worrisome in any lab working with small amounts of BECs

The Bosenova phenomenon is, as far as I can determine, not fully explained. Concluding it releases more energy than it contains flies in the face of the first law of thermodynamics and is a poor conclusion, but the real whopper here is why this is worrisome. The amount of energy involved here is incredibly small. The analogy to a supernova is just that — an analogy. This involves atomic interactions, not nuclear (which is several orders of magnitude difference) and the difference numbers of atoms involved is different by at least Avogadro’s number.*

The possibilities of a giant BEC bosenova produced in superfluid Helium II haven’t been investigated. The matter is urgent as 120 T of superfluid Helium II are being used at the Large Hadron Collider at Geneva

Now we descend into fear-mongering. Superfluid helium has been around for a while, and this hasn’t been a problem — you get it in a BEC under very specific conditions where you are adjusting the scattering length of the particles, and again, it’s not a frikkin’ supernova explosion!

The problem too, is that BECs are new and strange. It wasn’t until 1995 that an ultracold BEC was produced by new methods of supercooling, in this case applied to a gas of Rubidium-87 to bring it near absolute zero. For physics it was a sudden explosion in the quantum world. A new field of study, Condensed Matter Physics, a new state of matter positively confirmed, but far from understood.

More fear-mongering, and Condensed Matter Physics has been around for a while — it’s not a “new field of study.”

Research at MIT is on a massive scale with several big BEC labs, working in part on BEC atom lasers. Don’t worry, Ketterle has said, atom lasers only work in a vacuum and would only travel a meter without one. Nevertheless matter-wave lasers are bound to be improved. There’s always military interest and funding.

Interaction with atmosphere, or even a poor vacuum would destroy the coherence and heat up the atoms — military interest and funding won’t change that.

Though the bosenova effect is staggering in its repercussions for the Standard Model, none of the more than 200 teams experimenting with BECs appear interested. The only study groups working seriously on bosenovas are those at JILA.

We’re back to bosenova stuff, and some of the same misconceptions are repeated, along with a new one. The standard model describes fundamental particles and interactions. BECs are an atomic phenomenon — there aren’t any staggering repercussions here at all.

There’s a couple more paragraphs of fear-mongering related to the LHC (which, if you peruse this guy’s blog, seems to be his obsession), ending with

Seven years after the rubidium-85 BEC produced the first bosenova, we still don’t know what happened to half of the Rubidium-85 atoms that disappeared.

I’ll give you a hint — they didn’t disappear from the earth, just from the trap that was holding the BEC.

*Update. I appear to have lowballed the number a tad. My guess would have been ~10⁴⁸ or so. (~25 orders of magnitude for the number of particles, 8 for the energy scale of nuclear vs atomic reaction, i.e. 100 MeV vs eV, and another 15 for the temperature.) This story (pdf) from NASA pegs a supernova as releasing 10⁷⁵ times as much energy. It’s an interesting bit about the similarities and differences between BECs and neutron stars.