New tools for terrorists

Terrorism is one of the more serious threats that national governments have to deal with these days. Fortunately, academics have thought about what sort of dirty tricks terrorists may try next and how to prepare for them. Here's what one paper said:

"If recent trends in terrorism have taught us anything, it is that terrorists are nimble actors who can be innovative when necessary. At the same time, technological development is inherently dynamic, with one of the negative externalities of this dynamism being the opportunities it can provide for malefactors. New technologies include cheap, accessible sprayers to disperse chemical agents, nanotech, proteinacious microspheres, aerosol vaccine delivery, bioinformatics, SNP's (single nucleotide polymorphisms) and Bose-Einstein condensates."

Bose-Einstein condensates? That's a state of matter that you get when you cool things down to temperatures of a few nanokelvins. When you get things very cold, enough atoms collapse into a single quantum state that you can actually see quantum effects. Liquids will crawl up the sides of a bottle, for example, because there's essentially no friction between the condensate and the bottle.

This doesn't sound like a good weapon for a terrorist to use. The equipment needed to keep a few thousand atoms of Bose-Einstein condensate cold is pretty big. It's definitely not the sort of thing that a terrorist can sneak past the TSA and onto an airplane. And if they could, what could they do with their exotic matter to cause trouble?

There is, however, a bizarre effect that's been called a "bosenova" that can occur when you put a Bose-Einstein condensate in the right kind of magnetic field. The word is based on the word "supernova," because the magnetic field can make the Bose-Einstein condensate fly apart in a dramatic explosion. Physicists don't seem to fully understand why bosenovas happen yet, but I doubt whether they're a suitable weapon for a terrorist to use.

In addition to having the equipment needed to make the Bose-Einstein condensate, you also need specialized equipment for making the precise kind of magnetic field that's needed to make the bosenova. And even if you have all of this equipment, it takes a huge amount of energy to make just a few thousand atoms of Bose-Einstein condensate. None of this equipment is cheap, and it's definitely not the kind of stuff that the average person could put together, even with a few million dollars in funding. I think that terrorists could probably find a better use for their time and money, so worrying about attacks using Bose-Einstein condensates is close to the bottom of the list of things that I worry about.

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