I tried googling it, I got as far as typing "dangerous strangel" before, sure enough, a list of hits appeared with a Wikipedia page at the top. Before I added the "l", I had a lot of default pages about "dangerous strangers", but human search pattern aside, I thought the wiki was as good as any a place to start. In the very first line it states that strangelets are hypothetical particles, which I suppose means there are theories predicting them but no observations (or they wouldn't be hypothetical), but help me out here.
To answer your question... Interpretation, imaginary particles are not really dangerous!... There are many who take advantage of the fact that people are often afraid of the unknown. Some even get caught up in their own fear mongering.
Sometimes another word for hypothetical, is imaginary. Imagination is perhaps one of our most valuable assets. Without it we would still be huddled in caves. It can also be a dangerous thing when we stop understanding the difference, between what we imagine and what we know to be real!
They are imaginary? As in they have never been observed? I thought RHIC had produced them? Have they been "seen" in any astronomical phenomena? Wasn't CERN attempting to recreate them?
It's a what-if paper. What if there were such a thing as low-mass CFL strangelets stable against weak decay. What if the QMDD extension to the MIT bag model were applicable. What if our guess at parameters to such a model were applicable. None of those starting points is a fact. Using that starting point, the authors of that paper argue for certain consequences. But those consequence don't argue that their hypothetical choice of parameters, models and unseen phenomenon is in the class of "dangerous strangelet" as Wagner would try and have them say. Figure 5 says only slet-1 (the positive one) is expected to be energetically favored over ordinary nuclear matter, so the other slets considered might be not be repelled by nuclear matter's Coulomb charge, but fusion would not be exothermic. Even though this 2006 paper shares an author in common with the 2014 paper Wagner gave in post #128, they talk about different models with different parameterizations for strangelets. Neither is in the class of a stable or meta-stable low mass chunk of strange quark matter where fusion with ordinary nuclei is energetically favored. Neither paper attempts to fit their parameters to the study of recently observed hypernuclei because both models ignore hadronization and treat the stranglet as an unstructured drop of fluid held in a bag, which might be applicable for very large A, but is unlikely to apply to a hyper nucleus like those produced by the FINUDA experiment at DAφNE, with negative Kaons at 16 MeV hitting a target of Lithium or the catalogued debris from hadronization (freezing out) of RHIC and LHC matter-antimatter fireballs. The fear-mongers lack the expertise to do physics, but that doesn't stop them from trying to dress up their claims with the trappings of science. But it's dishonest to cite either of these papers as supporting any "dangerous strangelet" collider scenario as physically plausible when their choices led to the opposite conclusion. And when one is dishonest in arguing for one's viewpoint, others must question one's true motive.
RHIC didn't produce bulk SQM like strangelets, but a few hypernuclei which are modeled with discrete nucleons and expected statistically. People interested in bulk SQM don't even bother treating quarks as discrete entities, but use models with continuous parameters for things we know are discrete, just like fluid mechanics ignores that water is made of molecules. But hypernuclei (like ordinary nuclei) exhibit discrete structure and are thus candidates for spectroscopy like at FINUDA. A physically-constrained model of Bulk SQM might be a good model for the interior of a neutron star or for A > 200, but not so much for A < 12. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v467/n7319/abs/nature09466.html http://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.88.085001 http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.3242 http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.8686
