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Man-Made Black Holes Looming?
camusflage writes: "The New York Times has a story that some physicists think it might be possible to make black holes at the under construction Large Hadron Collider at CERN, slated to come online in 2006. Trying to allay concerns about a man-made black hole blipping us out of existence, they say "The same calculations ... predict that around 100 such black holes a year are `organically' and apparently safely produced in the earth's atmosphere in cosmic ray collisions." As long as we can keep critters from building nests in the singularity, we should be okay."
May I suggest the first black hole should be placed right on those responsible for yesterday's attck?
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
Nuclar power was once thought to be the greatest thing ever. It would be safe reliable and the cure all for everything. Just look at chernolye (however it's spelled). I just don't think trying to make a black hole is a good idea. I know the odd's are astronical that it destroy the world.
But then again what are the odd's two jumbo jets would run into the WTC.
guvf vf zl fvt
Can't have any naked singularities running around...
Ouch. Black hole puns. There's no excuse.
Viper Out
if they really can control them, then this might have some potenial for swallowing up balistic missiles. just a thought.
maskirovka
We all know Black holes suck..
I couldn't FP I guess I wan't logged in.
Anyway, I remember seen a show on time travel on which (theoretically) they would use 2 man made wormholes to go back in time, but then tehy theorized that it wouldn't work, that the wormholes would collapse right before you would pass trough.
We live in wounderous times indeed.
- DarkMoon -
www.itl.tv
Your own little black hole instead of a trash can.
Placing your black hole between you and your mother in law to suck in the boring conversation.
No more standing in line in shops or outside disco's.
A good excuse when your boss comes complaining about all the budget you are eating: "It wasn't me, it was the company black hole!"
I intend to live forever, so far so good.
The particle physicists say there are only very, very small chances that these singularities could be dangerous. Of course, IIRC, not all physicists believe that small black holes evaporate. Some cosmologists argue that the "missing" dark matter needed to account for the universe's decelerating expansion will be found in many, many mini black holes, so they have found ways to explain how black holes might stick around.
(alos, if little harmless singularities are popping up all the time in our atmosphere due to cosmic rays, then how come those neutrino detector counts are always coming up short?)
When Thales was asked what was difficult, he said, "To know one's self." And what was easy, "To advise another."
From the article: We've been trying for a century, and we still don't fully understand black holes," said Dr. Andrew Strominger. And then he goes on to conclude that we need to make some.
If they're going to do something which at least sounds dangerous, I would really like it if they could say, "Nothing can possibly go wrong", not, "Our understanding is incomplete."
From the article:
"Dr. Greg Landsberg, a Brown University physicist who works at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., is part of a team planning for black hole production."
Batavia is also the home of Aldi. It's interesting that we're expecting a city to control the black holes the make, when the most disgusting refried beans ever produced come from the same town!
Free unix account: freeshell.org
Everyone knows there's already a singularity in the web. Try www.com it's where the web begins!
Speculation on the ultimate weapon at my house settled on countdown controlled blackholes...some small high energy device that, when triggered, creates a black hole that swallows all available matter until a saturation point is reached...tactical black holes, strategic black holes, etc. Of course this is a long tradition, first encountered in my experience with the D&D 'portable holes' and such.
Still, the synchronicity is interesting...and now that a method seems to exist all that remains is shrinking the power source. Which is a problem this may incidentally solve.
And forget cemetaries!
Writers imply. Readers infer.
Big or little...You'll never convince me that making a singularity is a good idea.
What if, in the future, they have the ability to make bigger singularities...Maybe not "star sized"...But big enough to get started on the world...what then?
Will we be held hostage by a terrorist, threatening to "eat the world?" It seems farfetched...but, christ, we're talking about black holes, here.
--Life may have no meaning, or, even worse, it may have a meaning of which you disapprove.
For those of you who haven't read it, its a story about a group of scientists accidentally dropping a lab-made black hole into the center of the earth. Whoops! Quite a good deal more goes on which and it all makes quite a good read.
I spent all of those years as Anonymous Coward and all I got was this lousy number (204976).
On one hand if you can create a temporary black hole, you can go ooh, neat, we created a black hole.
On the other hand if it turns out not to be temporary, you just destroyed earth.
Negative risk just slightly outweighs the positive doesn't it?
Since there's a relatively concentrated ammount of ambient particles and whatnot here on earth, how would we get rid of the black hole? I know at least that they dissapate naturally when no energy is availible to feed them but since our environment is not that case what can we do? Could we transport it elsewhere?
As everyone knows, gravity is the weakest of all the fundamental forces by a very very long way, something like 40 orders of magnitude weaker than the weakest of the nuclear forces. I remember reading an article here long ago (can't find it and put a link to it because Slashdot search is down...grr) that talked about some speculation that gravity is so weak because the universe has more dimensions than the four that we see (this is also a prediction of superstring theory), and while the other three forces are only capable of propagating there, gravity is able to propagate through these extra dimensions, making it seem weaker. These dimensions are supposed to be curled up small so we don't normally notice them, so one of the implications of this theory is that the value of the universal gravitational "constant" should shoot up dramatically when you try to measure it at smaller scales; the smallest scale at which gravity has been measured so far is on the order of centimeters only. Another implication is that it should be possible to create low mass black holes with less energy than the weakness of gravity as we know it predicts. So if these scientists are successful in making such small black holes, it could go a long way to validating this theory.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Everybody already knows black holes spontaneously appear. Here's an experiment to prove it.
Place two matching socks in a washer machine. turn the washer machine on, wait for it to finish. Remove the single sock. Voila. Black holes.
Now place that single sock into the drier. Turn it on, wait for it to finish. Remove one entirely different sock, which you have never owned. Kazow. Alternate Dimensions.
The field of pairingsocks physics solved the Black Hole question years before the cosmologists or those silly particle physicists. This article is old news.
but wouldn't this energy be better spent trying to solve existing problems instead of opening up a whole new can of worms?
People are dying of disease, the world is going to run out of fossil fuels, the earth is warming up and animals are dying out, and some scientists are jacking off trying to make a black hole in a lab. Blah. :P
My Webcomic: Asylum on 5th Street
Maybe they should read:
How We Lost the Moon, A True Story By Frank W. Allen
This is a sci-fi short-story about some scientists who "accidentally" created a black hole.
whoops...
Check out the relatively unknown SciFi series called Star Wars. The newer books, telling the story approximately 20 years after the death of the emperor, already include using black holes as offensive and defensive weapons
Of course I wouldn't consider Star Wars to be 'hard SciFi'. Doesn't George Lucas say that the books (I'm presuming you mean the official books here) are second only to the movie in 'correctness' about the Star Wars universe.
Still I'm glad I don't live there, without midichlorines(sp?) in my blood, I'd be one of those extras that get killed off early for effect.
No, we are not talking about black holes capable of swallowing matter, nor are we talking about the ability to "place them" at any particular point. Though, it does make for an interesting bit of science-fiction.
You must understand that every individual type of particles and radiants have their own, what may be referred to as, gravimetric frequency. You may note in the article that Dr. Giddings' calculations suggest that the interactions of cosmic rays and sub-atomic particles produce, what he calls, "organic," black holes, referring to naturally occurring black holes.
This team is producing the black holes from specific, fully separated subatomic particles, those being gluons and quarks. Black holes produced by collapsing stars result from still-integrated subatomic particles (matter), which remain connected gravimetrically to other large sources of gravity (fuel), are not anything to worry about here; in fact, they couldn't even be produced on the surface of the planet (the core, however, is a different idea altogether). The "man-made" varieties will only be able to effect other nearby gluons and quarks. In an vacuum-sealed accelerator, they will not be able to "find" that source of energy and will evaporate relatively quickly; though, I disagree that the result will be an abundance in the spawning of similar sub-atomic particles.
I recommend The Elegant Universe, by Brian Greene. You'll learn about how the universe works according to ideas as old as "General Relativity" to as recent as the "M-Theory".
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
...aside from the obvious bragging rights -- "What did you do at the office today, honey?" "Oh, I fabricated a few black holes." -- is that, should this work, it would demonstrate that gravity does not in fact obey the inverse-square law over short distances. It blows my mind to think of it obeying, say, an inverse-seventh-power law, which I believe would imply that the universe really has eight spatial dimensions...
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
Without "pure" science, you end up with a lot fewer practical applications appearing.
If you'd like to criticize mis-allocated resources, I strongly recommend that you examine the cosmetics industry.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
We're a type 13 planet in the final stages of our development. It's all over.
As long as we can keep critters from building nests in the singularity, we should be okay."
i'm more worried about evil sadistic demonic things torturing me and then taking me with them back to another dimension that resembles hell [us.imdb.org].
-BlueLines
--BlueLines "The cost of living hasn't affected it's popularity." -anonymous
As the article mentioned. It would take so much energy just to create these small black holes that the odds of creating the earth sucking ones are statistically negligable. In other words we're not lucky enough to destory ourselves. :)
Currently Playing at a SciFi Channel near you..
Type 13 planet, on the verge of measuring the
mass of the Higgs Boson, usually gets squashed
to the size of a pea ending all life on the
stupid planet.
The ultimate Darwin Award
The possibility that the book could be then represented by the energy given off by the hole as it vanished might mean that given a snapshot of this energy pattern another black hole could recreate the book at another place in another time.
Sure it's all Sci-fi now, but this may be the next step into figuring out more about worm holes, new dimensions and the like. And only four more years to wait for this little toy to be built.
Is there any discussion of possible industrial applications should this in fact become both possible and controllable?
I don't care how smart they might think they are or how many thought experiments they may have done but this is not an experiment I want done on my planet. I'm thinking this kind of shit should be done a deep space probe on the opposite side of the galaxy. want to make a black hole? fine. do it very far away from me. as someone else pointed out we know nothing about black holes theres no way we should be making one. if the scientists want a challenge they can try and figure out why running water makes you want to pee. there are tons of other things they could research and test without putting the entire planet at risk. anyone ever seen the episodes of Lexx on earth? we're the type planet that always ends up blinking itself out of existence.
-
Doesn't this mean, however, that those subatomic particles have to be present in those extra dimensions for the extradimensional gravity to affect them?
I don't know that just because you might have six dimensions worth of gravity it will necessarily use its whole force on four dimensions worth of particles. Or does the fact that these are microdimensions mean that all subatomic particles automagically exist in all of them?
Does anyone here know?
-Crypthanatopsis
Their are reports that many of Sun's employees were killed in the WTC disaster. Sun's main website has been unavailable since yesterday. What the hell is happening?
I'm actually reminded of a part in "Spacetime Donuts" by Rudy Rucker, where the main character is hanging out with an eccentric, mad-scientist type acquaintance, where he picks up a strange device and fiddles with it for a moment, and accidentally creates a mini black hole, which then drops through the floor on a journey to and through the earth's core. Oops.
-j
Torg, come out of the spaceship. Nothing can stop Torg.
Maybe they can figure out a way to create a black hole I can throw my trash into.
-- I'll cut you up so bad, you'll wish I'd never cut you up so bad!
does it run linux?
Check out the relatively unknown SciFi series called Star Wars. The newer books, telling the story approximately 20 years after the death of the emperor, already include using black holes as offensive and defensive weapons. Quite interesting, since it is suggested that these holes can also be controlled sizewize. Not impossible *if* you know how to extract energy from a black hole. Interested? Check out the "New Jedi Order" books.
So-called Hawkings Radiation is the only energy known to extract itself from black holes. The problem is that even if drastically accellerated, it would be a lengthy process and there is reason to believe that as a black hole might decay, it might actually eventually explode. Cool, we get rid of the ICBM and get something much more dangerous which will either:
1: Eat us and everyone else alive or
2: Explode with near perfect matter to energy conversion making the ICBM threat look pretty minor.
Either way, it would be a very bad idea.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
The theory that evaporation occurs with the collapse of a wavelength is that which results particle formation. This goes against the TSR (true singularity rule), however, even with displacing that rule, as I tend not to believe in it, it goes against the quantum behavioural pattern of black holes. The idea of the "tie-off" in relating theories doesn't appeal to me, and thus far, hasn't appealed to most structural theories of the universe with a conditional twist in the first law of thermodynamics. The anomaly will extend itself, and the collapse will result in an equatorial discharge of the redundant, unsustainable energy. I extend that if that is the result, these intrepid explorers of dimensions won't even realize they've created a black hole or any similar event.
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
They better not try to put their pet black hole in a bag of holding.
does not inspire confidence. Not just because of the hybris (or the movie indoctrination where nemesis always follows that kind of hybris). But because it is not the sort of thing real scientists say.
Real scientists know their understanding is always (and will always be, it is mathematically proven (by Gödel)) incomplete.
And they are not shy of saying so. "Our understanding is now complete" is no way to ensure funding for new reasearch. Think about it.
..CS might well stand for crackpots, but definitely some interesting material. Not recommended for philosophobes. may we live in (exponentially acceleratingly) interesting times!
s ing.html
http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~phoenix/vinge/vinge-
http://singularitywatch.com
http://singinst.org
for the love of Life!
*(r)
memes don't exist. tell all your friends.
(enlightened by na-fun)
Black holes have a reputation for being mass-gobbling irreversible singularities, and they are. But this doesn't mean a black hole where the Sun is would swallow the Earth. I'm not an expert so someone can correct me if they know it better or more accurately.
Any amount of mass can be turned into a black hole - you just have to crush it into a small enough space. This is because every bit of matter has an event horizon, including the Sun (or the Earth for that matter). The difference with the Sun and most things is that the event horizon for the amount of matter in the sun is smaller than the Sun. If you crushed all of Sun's matter into a sufficiently tiny space that it was all inside, then everything else that moved inside would collapse and not return.
What most people don't realise is that if the Sun spontaneously turned into a black hole, we wouldn't die from being sucked in. We'd die from lack of solar energy. Because the Sun-black-hole would have the same mass, everything orbiting it would continue to orbit it the same way it is at the moment. The only big difference would be when something happened to wander inside the event horizon at which point it wouldn't leave, if you ignore all the wierd relativity things that go on at that point at least.
So I guess the point is that just because someone says they might be able to make a black hole, it doesn't mean you'll be instantly sucked in tommorrow without any warning.
Ya know, it's theorized by some SF authors that our universe teems with life. Others argue "if this were the case, why haven't they made contact with us yet?"
Well, if cultures develop the know-how to MAKE blackholes, and they do not just go away, that might explain it.
And astronomers are always saying how many of these are floating around...
name one experiment that you can do on earth right now, that you would think of, and then NOT request funding for because it was too dangerous.
Come one, name one.
Take this personaility test.
Even two objects as small as subatomic particles would form a black hole if they were squeezed into an extremely small space. That, however, would require the energy of a particle accelerator the size of a galaxy, something that would never get through Congress.
I should hope not... even appropriations in the name of science have limits, especially considering the recent lack of such appropriations for even small projects.
Please don't mark me as troll or flaimbait, at least in sci-fi black holes can be used to go back and forth in time.
.gov knows EXACTLY where all these people were at before the disaster.
Would it be possible to go back and change the recent events? Imagine if we could avoid our own casulties from the WTC, I bet our
Please if anyone knows about these time travel/black hole theories or laws of physics please post them.
--toq
I'm not to experienced in this field of science but what happens if we get so advanced and start using black holes as trashcans as some of you people say. What would happen to the material that actually should "go back" to earth but instead gets sucked into a black hole to become something _non-extractable_?
:)
Yes I know we get lots of dust from space but will it be enough when every single geek has a black hole cocacola/beer trashcan?
I remember reading A Brief History of Time where Stephen Hawking talks about a "cosmic censorship hypothesis", which in its weak form states that singularities can only occur in places (like black holes) where they're decently hidden from public view. In its strong form, it says that singularities can only occur in the past (such as the Big Bang singularity), or in the future (such as with a singularity in a black hole)...
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Fast forward a few years, scientists make a black hole. Why doesnt it destroy the earth?
1) The black hole weighs no more than the particles slammed together to make it. It has essentially zero pull on anything. A grain of salt would make an incredibly more effective attractor.
So you say, yes, but the black hole will persist and continue to grow in mass by swallowing more and more particles.
But the scientists in the Times article say the black hole will "evaporate".
The following paragraph, from this page, states it well:
Since the 1970s, it has been known that black holes are not completely black. In fact, they emit very low-energy radiation called Hawking radiation. The lower the mass of a black hole, the higher the energy of the emitted Hawking radiation. As a black hole radiates, its mass decreases, and it starts emitting more and more radiation, causing it to evaporate more and more rapidly. Eventually, it shrinks to around the Planck mass, the point at which its DeBroglie wavelength is equal to the Schwarzschild radius. At this point, we no longer know what happens, since to describe physics at the Planck scale requires a theory of quantum gravity.
I can see the headlines in the news:
"Black hole pops up over Afghanistan"
You are correct.
Furthur, as a black hole, the Sun would continue to emit radiation, called Hawking radiation. This would continuously drop the mass of the black hole Sun. As the mass of the black hole decreases, so does the level of radiation.
This is the evaporation spoke of in the article. Since their black hole is only 2 particles in mass, it's not a long process.
Aren't there already billions of particles right next to other particles in sub-millimeter lengths?
I.e. with any solid object?
I'm assuming that they meant to say "when travelling at extremely high speeds toward each other, it is possible that they would enter extra dimensions"... but still, isn't that just a vague idea that we really have no basis to make an assumption on?
"leap of faith" is an understatement. This is more like a "we have a rocket here that can put you into orbit on 2L of gas!" leap of faith.
And they "predict" by the same leap of faith that we have 100s of these forming in the atmosphere, so why can't they just go there to do their tests? If what they say is true, that the disintigration pattern is unmistakable, then it should not be difficult at all to perform this in the atmosphere, or at worst in space itself (i.e. the space station)... no?
If God gave us curiosity
as the mass of the black hole decreases, so does the level of radiation.
should be
as the mass of the black hole decreases, the level of radiation increases.
The process accelerates as the black hole drops in mass.
Let me see if I have this correct:
We can get enough funding for:
experimental weapons
Nifty accelorators
Generating exotic particles
but not for making some breeder reactors?
why?
.. along 1982 at Skyline High School in
Dallas Texas, a math club theorized that
sufficiently small black holes would
inevitabliy evaporate due to their
potential for creating antimatter
at their event horizons due to pair
formation of particles in a vacumn..
and eventually explode, disemboweling
themselves through a temporal reassertion
of local space time laws, inspite of
any connotations of things called
"singularites".. to paraphrase Mark Twain
.. rumours of my absence from this
universe, were greatly exaggerated.
.. a few years later Kip Thorn and
Stephen Hawking guestimated along
the same directions.. I think they
won a Noble prize or something.
.. point being, the theory that local
universal laws may have been bent
slightly to protect the children
in their playpen still seem to
be in effect..
.. now as for 1984, same club was
speculating on uneven distributions
in the background radiation of the
Universe.. ever wonder what they're
up to now?
.. I'll give you a hint - the GUID was
always much simpler than it appeared,
and much more about the physical universe
has already been discovered than previously
thought.
Were are just beginning to catch a glimpse of Dr. Who's Timelord technology and may someday figure out his greatest invention, the Sonic Screwdriver. Will we use this technology for good, like the Dr., or to create blacholes with which to suck up Galafri into like The Master. Only time will tell.
At last! An efficient way of cleaning my room! hmm on second thoughts perhaps it's not quite powerful enough.
The Taleban website, appears to be continually hacked. Every time they fix their site, within minutes it's defaced again. WAY TO GO!!!!!! I'll make a mirror of the hack for prosperity. I don't feel so completely helpless anymore! There has to be more that we as a community of geeks can do, other than giving blood (VERY IMPORTANT!), or donating cash. I'm sure that the lowlife communicated electroniclly, maybe have secure or hidden websites. Think about a cell based organization, picking up and dropping off information anonymously via FTP. I'm almost positive that info is out there. LET'S FIND IT!
--- Think of it as evolution in action ---
Still we wouldn't have any way of controlling it. Suppose it fell out of its containment. Then it would simply start aggregating mass. It would not bounce off of the floor, it would simply make a hole in it and continue down, slowing down until it reaches the center of our gravity. Still doesn't sound comforting to me.
as night the day, that a small number could last a long time if they found matter to absorb before evaporating?
Perhaps we have some near the Earth's core, or maybe there is a much smaller but more accesible number
in the Lagrangian Points. IANA astrophysicist but it would seem quite likely that the moon's core would have such black holes. If so, might black holes in the lunar core be detected through perturbation of neutrino density during lunar eclipses?
On another note might microscopic black holes be able to change the ratio of neutrino flavors seen when solar neutrinos are viewed after passing through the Earth? Fascinating subject!
Can't wait to store my data in those extra dimensions.. hard disk will never get full! (not)
(Has anyone else read David Brin's Earth?)
Is your company running tools written by ma
Sorry meant solar eclipse. The story being that
physicists have found that neutrinos oscillate between three "flavors" during their trip from the Sun to us, and that a different ratio of these flavors is found when they are detected after passing through the Earth. For neutrinos, ordinary matter is as thin as air is to us, but I'd imagine a black hole would put a kink in their travel plans! Some physicist help!
How long before we see the Ronco TrashMaster 3000 on Sunday mornings.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
isn't it what they where trying to do in half-life... but than again i'm no expert !
To ensure our safety, all nuclear research should be banned until we know enough about it to know what the risks are.
Even if it was Osama Bin Laden, which it could be but hasn't been proven yet, how can you even think of judging an entire religion on the acts of a few fanatics? I am an American, if I choose to go on a killing spree tomorrow does that mean all Americans are psychopaths and killers? Not all people who do bad things are of one religion or nationality; I can't even comprehend what could make you think so. You are only adding to the problem, it was hate that got us into this in the first place. The hate of the terrorists, and yes, our hate as well. You strike out at a people from the protection of anonymity, at least when Hitler published he did it under his own name.
This story from CNN.Com's /Space section:
Cool Star Chills Stellar Theories
The referred to article explains a discovery of the Chandra X-ray Observatory finding a surprisingly cool star, despite being bombarded by its companion star.
As for the rest of what you discussed, I concur completely
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
Oops, it seems the post I was replying to is gone, needless to say it was just spouting hate at Muslims.
I also have seen things about 11 or more dimensions, and all but our familiar 4 curled up too small to perceive. But then I wonder if perhaps that's just a tad egocentric of us. Maybe some dimensions are curled up on our quantum scale, but what if our familiar 4 are curled up on someone else's quantum scale?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Is there any hope of throwing in more mass before it evaporates?
An evaporating black hole converts mass to energy. If it could be stabilized, it would be very useful. Probably not the research you want to do on your only planet, though.
Thanks for confirming it. One thing about this that I'm not sure I understand is where you say it emits radiation.
One definitive concept about black holes is that nothing can escape from past the event horizon including light and other radiation. Do you mean radiation from other things that come near it without getting too close?
James P. Hogan, Thrice Upon a Time. It's actually a time travel novel, but one of the subplots involves a particle collider which is making lots and lots of tiny black holes. This was written a couple of decades ago, I believe. A good read if you like Hogan's stuff.
-Rob Knop
There was a similar concern with the Manhattan project tests that when a nuclear chain reaction was started it would start a chain reaction that would continue to every adjacent atom effectively destroying the world.
Back in the 1940s during the first secret bomb
tests some scientists were afraid an open air
nuke explosion would cause the oxygen and
notrogen in the air to burn into nitric acid.
And a chain reaction could burn all the air.
However very little of this happened.
It is thought the friction of large meteors
do a similar thing.
In future GUI's, you will be able to delete unwanted files by dragging them to the black hole on your desktop.
Since the energy for these new particles has to come from somewhere, the black hole loses mass. Fucked if I can understand it! But that's the explanation for folks without the deep maths to really understand it. Still, if the Earth were a black hole we'd definitely be dead, and that I think is the worry some people have expressed.
-- What do you need?
-- Gnus. Lots of Gnus.
Larry Niven has dealt with very small black holes in his short story The Hole Man. Possible FTL communications if gravity waves are FTL, but has a tendency to eat planets. If that force beam generator from a while back turns out real we could have a real way of controling these things.
From the article: We've been trying for a century, and we still don't fully understand black holes," said Dr. Andrew Strominger. And then he goes on to conclude that we need to make some.
If they're going to do something which at least sounds dangerous, I would really like it if they could say, "Nothing can possibly go wrong", not, "Our understanding is incomplete."
Actually, there's a pretty ironclad argument for this being safe - the same one that comes up every time the press starts fearmongering about more powerful accelerators:
Cosmic rays with energies far higher than will be produced by any accelerator any time soon have been striking the earth and the moon for billions of years. If high-energy collisioins could cause catastrophy, they would have already, because they've been happening in our neighbourhood for quite a while.
The fact that nothing around here has been sucked into a black hole yet leads us to conclude that if micro-black-holes can be formed, they don't do much.
Our current models of black holes suggest that micro-holes would evapourate in a burst of Hawking radiation almost as soon as they're formed. The smaller the hole, the more intense the Hawking radiation (and so the faster it loses mass).
Let's face it, they are on something.
Next they will want to use it as a teleport. Any volunteers?
Suppose on their way to the singularity a proton and anti-proton meet. Bang! Gone in a flash of gamma radiation. But the gamma can't get out, so its total energy (equal to the mass of the P+ and P-) still counts towards the hole's mass.
And the singularity itself isn't really matter at all. It can have a charge, but if you smash a positive one and a negative one together, you just get a big neutral one.
Someone tell me if I'm just spouting - I'm not a physicist, just a SF enthusiast.
-- What do you need?
-- Gnus. Lots of Gnus.
Thrice Upon a Time has a plot thread about an experiment that generates tiny black holes that don't show themselves as growing until a few months pass (with wierd unexplainable holes in things until people figure it out). But don't worry, their trusty DEC PDP-21 will help fix things!
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Quite frankly, an experiment with even a very remote possibility of creating a black hole with unknown implications for human safety should be stopped immediately by legislators and those providing funding. Could they not wait to do this in a safer location off-planet? What if the black holes get more massive as they collect matter? It's not like we can move them off planet.
As much as I like to find out things about my world and my universe, I'm not going to jeopardize the immediate existence of myself and others to do it. If anyone can't make that distinction and have enough ethical sense as to the implications of their experiments, they don't deserve to be a scientist.
It would not bounce off of the floor, it would simply make a hole in it and continue down, slowing down until it reaches the center of our gravity.
That is exactly what happens to the earth in Dan's Simmons Hugo winning novel Hyperion. Of all the scifi novels I have read, I always figured that one to be among the least plausible. Pretty freaky idea., but at least *that* would get us off the planet.
I guess we are right on track for the First Warp Flight.
Just look at Rosie O'Donnel. Anything within the event horizon (line of sight) disappears into the black hole (oral cavity).
No not all Muslims should die. ALL MUSLIM EXTREMISTS/FACTIONS should die!!!!!!!!!!!
I dont care if its inhumane. Id kill millions of muslim extremists to protect my wife from any harm.
I am not a physicist, but I've read Cosmos a few times.
Aren't they really talking about creating really heavy atoms;
or neutron stars or whatever (not sure of the exact term for it).
In order for a black hole to be a "black hole" it would have
to be large enough to absorb light; and therefore it would
require a hell of a lot more mass than we have in the solar
system.
I'm sure such a heavy atom wouldn't be stable for long... if
atoms with atomic weight of 200-250 last a fraction of a
second, how long would one of these things survive?
If it doesn't, how come there are black holes that do seem to attract everything towards them, like perhaps the one in the center of our galaxy???
Hrmm.... This is kind of similar to this lecture I sat through at UT about how they think that its possible for a blackhole to exist at the center of a star and swallow the star from the inside out. You're sitting on the beach sun-bathing one muinute and all of a sudden the sun disappears. Dunno the details of it though.... I only went to the lecture for extra credit so I wasn't paying too much attention. Anyone else heard of this?
Let's see what kind of conspiracies you guys can cook up with that little tidbit. ;-)
ALDI is a German supermarket chain. It's Bavaria,
Du saudaemlicher Depp, and not Batavia!
So this could be considered the ultimate in sending something to /dev/null ?
I love hyperion, but I can't remember any black holes on earth- and I've read the book maybe twenty times. Perhaps you're thinking of Earth [amazon.com] by David Brin?
marotti.com
Any way we could use these little buggers to build one of those "Spacetime drives" we're always hearing about?
You're missing the point. The particle colliders are located on Earth, so if one manufactures a black hole, the consequences would be Not Good.
That is to say, the black hole would punch a hole into the ground, and start oscillating about the center of the Earth. It'll eat up all the matter in its path, and keep growing. We'll have some fun with earthquakes, volcano eruptions, etc. before the end of the world finally arrives.
Of course, the fact that we aren't likely to manufacture such a stable black hole is that it hasn't already occured, as the article points out.
Everything attracts everything else towards it, and the solution this differential equation (in the case of two bodies) is conic section orbits. Time for you to catch up with Isaac Newton and 17th century physics.
No, it's Batavia. See this legal document:
http://www.ftc.gov/opa/1997/9705/aldibrun.htm
Free unix account: freeshell.org
I'm no physicist, but like many here I like science fiction. Does anyone know if this could somehow be used to produce artificial gravity? or as some kind of propulsion for spacecraft? It seems really interesting at any rate...
they make jokes on the show that the planet Earth is a certain class of planet that always destroys itself in due course because of its search for the Higgs boson.
Is this related at all to the interview that Steve Carrell of the Daily Show did on his Steve Carrell special? The old guy on there was attempting to talk about creating black holes. Of course you know how Daily Show interviews go.
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
Not quite. Since the Hawking radiation temperature of a 1 Solar Mass blackhole would be many, many orders of magnitude higher than the background radiation temperature of the universe (2.4 Kelvin), it would absorb far faster than it was emitting. It would have to be a really small black hole for Hawking radiation to dominate over absorption processes.
It was the premise of Higeria. The AI's cause a black hole to be created on Earth durring farcaster experiments. This forces humans to flee the Earth and create the World Web. It's referred to as The Big Mistake in the book.
arioch@chaos ~/earth/afghanistan $ cat osama.bin.laden > /dev/null
/dev/null
../palestine
/dev/null
arioch@chaos ~/earth/afghanistan $ cat taliban/* >
arioch@chaos ~/earth/afghanistan $ cd
arioch@chaos ~/earth/palestine $ cat yasser.arafat >
arioch@chaos ~/earth/palestine $ kill -9 ALLAH
...
******
"What makes you think I care about your opinions?"
Won't it swallow up the whole earth?
Due to a process called Hawking Radiation they tend to "evaporate" rather quickly. The time it will take depends on the size of the black hole, and the density of the surrounding material.
The exact formula is rather complex, but for average environments, a black hole has to be more than a 1000 tons at creation to be of any danger. Considering that particle accelerators never handle material heavier than a few atoms, we are quite a bit on the safe side...
Going back to the other articles on this...
For all the vaunted energy of our accelerators, we're still not in the same league with cosmic rays. So they estimated some 50 "organic" black holes per (forgotten time interval) created in the upper atmosphere by cosmic rays, and have a fair mathmatical confidence and better empirical evidence to support that.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
That should be 'every bit of matter has a Schwarzschild (spelling?) radius. That is the size you need to squeeze it to before it implodes under gravity. For the Earth, it is about 3mm, for the sun 3km.
Ask me if I've been required to disclose any crypto keys.
If 100 of these natural black holes occur per year in the atmosphere, then the odds of one appearing within the view of the Fly's Eye cosmic ray detector in Utah is quite high. The Fly's Eye has documented several events the apparent energy of which is so large (single atomic nuclei with the kinetic energy of a hard ball) that they are difficult to explain. Perhaps these natural black holes offer some alternative that reconciles observation with theory.
I know that this simple experiment will be safe, but it was kind of chilling, as it reminded me of the "Big Mistake" in Hyperion by Dan Simmons that destroyed the earth long before the story begins. Briefly, scientist and an AI created a black hole that destroyed earth (there is a lot more to it, but I won't put in spoilers, as the book is a great piece of SciFi).
sfbox
You're missing the point. The particle colliders are located on Earth, so if one manufactures a black hole, the consequences would be Not Good.
That is to say, the black hole would punch a hole into the ground, and start oscillating about the center of the Earth. It'll eat up all the matter in its path, and keep growing. We'll have some fun with earthquakes, volcano eruptions, etc. before the end of the world finally arrives.
No, you're missing the point. A black hole only has as much gravity as the mass that makes up the black hole. The gravity from two protons (to pick an example) is nowhere near enough to actually "eat up matter". A black hole would have to weigh about 1000 tons or so to do that. So creating a black hole from an atom or two won't do a thing.
In fact, it'll only exist for a fraction of a second, because it'll evaporate into Hawking radiation. It not only won't have enough mass to gobble up particles, it won't actually have any time to do it in anyway. At that size, the time that the black hole will exist is so close to zero that it makes no difference. All that you see is a bunch of weird particles and wavelengths formed from when the black hole evaporates away, because it evaporates away at more or less the same instant it was created.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
There were articles trying to scare people of this same thing when the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider went online. Well, Brookhaven National Labs hasn't yet sucked the rest of Long Island into it yet. I personally doubt that the LHC will do the same. My free opinion. Take it for what its worth.
Lottery: a tax on those bad at math.
I think you meant
The Hawking ... temperature ... would be ... orders of magnitude lower than ... 2.4 K ...
Since it would absorb more than it emits only if it's colder than the bath it is immersed in. Anywho, the Hawking Temperature of a 2 solar mass black hole is around 3 x 10^-8 Kelvin (from John Baez; do a google search for "hawking temperature solar mass")
Why would gravity behave that way? The answer requires taking a leap of faith: when one reaches into the submillimeter realm, extra dimensions open up. And when gravity has more dimensions in which to operate, it becomes far more intense.
This can be shown thusly: arrange the thumb and index finger on the same hand (preferably your own) so that they are less than a millimeter apart but not touching. Try to hold them there. Wasn't that impossible to hold for more than a second or two? That's because either you gave in to the extra dimensional gravity or you over compensated for it and wrenched your finger and thumb apart. Amazing.
To destroy a black hole requires negative mass/energy. That's the secret behind Hawking Radiation. Through some magic I never understood, the particle with negative energy from the spontaneously produced pair is the one that falls into the event horizon and is swallowed. Result: net energy loss by the black hole.
This causes the positive feedback cycle that others have mentioned and in time the black hole explodes in a final blast of radiation. Then we get to see if a naked singularity is left behind.
"You've crossed my Line of Death!" "What? No! Where is it?" "Here in the fine print...."
More interesting (and frightening) to me is the self-reproducing black hole - is it time for the United Nations to intervene in issues like this that have implications for us all?
Custer's Revenge: The greatest video
Didn't stop me.
No, you're missing the point :-) The OP noted that a black hole has the same gravity as anything with an equivalent mass. But that's certainly not the reason we're not worried about making a black hole on Earth!
I'm well aware of the stability issue; if you read my post again, you'll notice I mentioned it.
I *DID* read your post, and you still don't get it. You said:
It'll eat up all the matter in its path, and keep growing.
While I replied:
The gravity from two protons (to pick an example) is nowhere near enough to actually "eat up matter".
Thus answering your point. It won't fall thru the ground and oscillate around, because it's too small to actually suck matter inside it. Get it?
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
We've already found that. It's called a "lost cluster". That's where crucial elements of your data (you know, the small stuff like system files and important documents) go when you have to reset Windows 98 for the upteenth time.
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When the pin is pulled, Mr. Grenade is no longer our friend.
Yowsers, sorry you are right. I meant lower, which is obvious from the context of the rest of the sentence. :) Thanks for catching that.
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