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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."
Can't have any naked singularities running around...
Ouch. Black hole puns. There's no excuse.
Viper Out
We all know Black holes suck..
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."
if they really can control them, then this might have some potenial for swallowing up balistic missiles. just a thought.
The problem with a small black hole that eats up a balistic missile is that it suddenly becomes a much bigger black hole.
From the site may be able to produce miniature black holes on demand.
Notice they say miniature black holes - I'm presuming these are the sort of thing that you look at with a microscope (or not in this case since there won't be any light escaping...), not the sort of thing that captures a balistic missile.
Of course is you can manouver one of these things into the way of a balistic missile, then hold it in place against the kinetic energy imparted by said missile, you already have the technology required to stop the missile, so the black hole itself is rather pointless.
Pity really, it sounds like a good plot for a SciFi story.
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).
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.
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."
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.
;-)
I might suggest that you learn a thing or two about quantum field theory and relativity, before assuming that your opinion on the formation of quantum singularities is even remotely relevant. Given that this goes against the entire spirit of slashdot, I guess I forgive you
Seriously, though, these do apparently occur naturally, and evapourate quite quickly (generally speaking, a black hole evapourates more quickly as its radius shrinks). The problem will not be preventing the hole from growing out of control and consuming the planet, but keeping it around long enough to learn anything from it.
But then again what are the odd's two jumbo jets would run into the WTC.
Well, the odds are pretty good when they're being willfully directed to do so by the person at the controls. You can hardly claim it to be a random event.
Regards,
Michael
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
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
Ever hear of the Penrose extraction mechanism? It's a way of getting energy out of a black hole. Hardly possible with the objects being created here, but this research might be relevant decades (more likely centuries) from now, if (a big IF) and when we are capable of manipulating larger holes (or stabilising smaller ones). The amount of energy one can extract from a black hole is enormous, by any standard; more than enough to power the entire planet currently (if you'll pardon the pun).
Anyway, even disregarding such far-off potential applications, it is worthwhile to remember that quite a few of the technologies we consider invaluable today were originally questioned as being "impractical" by mundane contemporaries of the underlying basic research. The laser is a notable example, as is the electromagnet. Always a good thing to remember.
Cheers,
Michael
The ultimate Darwin Award
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.
-
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
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.
Uhmm, compared to other forms of energy measured by quantity, nuclear is still the lowest environmentally impacting and one of the safest. Chernobyl had a LOT of problems. 3 Mile Island was not as bad as it was made out to be. People just WANT you to be scared. I used to live near a fossile fuel powered plant. Currently I live near a nuclear one. The air is cleaner here, and the water is better. The plant is safer, there were was a rather large accident at the coal plant while I was there.
People seem to think that nuclear plants are introducing a hazard to our planet. Perhaps it is prudent to remind ourselves that prior to nuclear power, the stuff was covering the planet. The reason it's hard to find these days is that it was mined out. It's similar to the gold rush, but everyone knows where it is.
Think about it, if someone told you that dryer lint was valuable tommorow, your lint trap would never be full again, you'd sell it all right off. It's just that instead of having radioactive mountains & deserts, we have radioactive risers.
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.
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 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)
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!
but wouldn't this energy be better spent trying to solve existing problems
Okay, Doctor Drumlin. This is pure science at its best. Thanks to ever-advancing particle accelerators, we have more of an understanding now than ever about the world (and it is a completely different world) that forms us and our universe. From that understanding, we come up with the practical applications.
The truth about Scientology, Xenu, and you: Operation Clambake
How long before we see the Ronco TrashMaster 3000 on Sunday mornings.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
To ensure our safety, all nuclear research should be banned until we know enough about it to know what the risks are.
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.
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
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.
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).
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
Let's see what kind of conspiracies you guys can cook up with that little tidbit. ;-)
marotti.com
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.
"lowest environmentally impacting"???
in 1992, the world produced 125,000 tonnes of spent nuclear fuel. now it's about 200,000/yr, and the International Atomic Energy Agency speculates it will by 450,000/yr by 2050.
despite this huge amount of shit produced, and people speculating on what "could" be done with it, the fact is, no one knows what to do with nuclear waste.
bury it? have fun drinking contaminated groundwater.
shoot it into space? a challenger-type explosion (or a terrorist with a rocket launcher) and you irradiate all of florida.
there's really no real solution now...not to mention what will theoretically happen when the time comes to shut down a nuclear power plant. best suggestion anyone's got about that is just encasing the entire building in concrete.
ppl like you should take a look at the _real_ consequences of nuclear power, and put some thought towards the future of the planet...no doubt a solution/replacement for carbon-based fuels is needed, but for now, nuclear power is not it, so might as well keep looking.
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.
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.
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.
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")
This is off topic, but as a scientist I can't stand for this type of misinformation, so I feel that I must comment....
the fact is, no one knows what to do with nuclear waste.
Actually, scientists and engineers know of many ways to deal with nuclear waste; it is a political issue driven by individuals like yourself that don't know what they are talking about that prevents the technical solutions from being implemented. I mention only one elimination method: breeder reactors can be fed low and high level nuclear waste, and that waste is transmuted from high level/long term waste to high level/short term waste (meaning hours or days of radioactivity, as opposed to tens of thousands of years). Such a solution is technically feasible and has been demonstrated at large scale.
best suggestion anyone's got about that is just encasing the entire building in concrete.
No, the best solution that politics has allowed is encasing the building in concrete. There is little to no technical difficulty in pursuing a host of other solutions; again, uninformed anti-nuclear activists are teh biggest stumbling block to safe and effective methods of dealing with the remains of a reactor.
And although you didn't address this issue, let me point out that operating nuclear plants release no greenhouse gasses (no methane, no carbon dioxide, etc), no toxic heavy metals (cadmium, mercury, and lead, for example), no long-lived hydrocarbon carcinogens, certainly no soot, have a very small footprint (as compared to wind, water, and solar power), and much lower cost, when controlled for regulatory cost, environmental impact, and litigation. In fact, all operating nuclear plants in the world have released less nuclear contamination into the air and water than is released yearly by many individual coal and oil fired, "clean" power plants in operation today. You worry about a few hundred thousand tons of nuclear waste, while I worry about a few hundred MILLION tons of carbon combustion products released by conventional power plants, not to mention the millions of tons of soot and ash that are generated and must be disposed of.
Nuclear power does have its downsides, but on the whole, there is NO cleaner, more environmentally friendly, low impact method of generating electrical power available today than nuclear fission reactors. And that includes wind and solar power.
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.