World Science Festival: Telling Scary Stories of Strangelets

Serious scientists may disdain anecdotal evidence, but we have evidence that some of them are pretty good with an anecdote. Last Thursday, the World Science Festival brought a collection of science geeks to The Moth, where the brave souls took the stage not to explain their work, but to tell stories of their lives in science. The evening's biggest scientific celebrity was theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek, winner of a 2004 Nobel Prize in physics. His story began with a phone call. The editors of Scientific American were hoping he would write a rebuttal to a letter they'd just received. "The letter was from a man who I later learned was a banana farmer in Hawaii," Wilczek recalled. "He was worried about black holes. He was worried about a particle accelerator that was being built on Long Island that could produce black holes, and he was worried that the black holes ...