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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."
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."
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).
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
..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)
.. 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.
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.
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
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.