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The Next Big Particle Accelerator
Guinnessy writes "This year more than a thousand physicists gathered for three weeks at Snowmass Village, in the Colorado Rockies near Aspen, to talk about the future of particle physics in the US. Physics Today has a report on the meeting which says that the community should build a 500-GeV electron-positron linear collider. That's powerful enough to make mini black holes."
Nowhere in the article does it mention creating mini-black-holes. The purpose is to try to create Higgs bosons and to precisely measure their characteristics to get a better handle on how electroweak symmetry breaking works.
To create mini-black-holes, you'd need a Planck-energy accelerator. This is beyond our current ability to build, and will remain so for quite a while. Scientific American had an article many years ago about what you'd have to do to build a conventional linac that powerful; it ended up having to be constructed in space and taking 2% of the sun's power output to run.
On a more mundane scale, we have experimental evidence (from cosmic rays of the same energy) that nothing catastrophically bad happens in collisions at energies of up to about 1.0e30 eV. We're not going to produce energies this high for a very long time either (current accellerators get in the 1.0e13 range at most; that's 100,000,000,000,000,000 times too low to be a concern).
See this story.
The main reassurance we have is that cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere do get to highly energies than we've ever created. Hence if those energies can create mini black holes, then it must happen naturally in the upper atmosphere. Mini black holes from the upper atmosphere have yet to the destroy the Earth, so there is good reason to believe that nothing created in the accelerator will either.
Incidently, I was told that if Fermilab loses confinement on their Tevatron beam, it hits the ring with the force of a big rig hitting a wall. Hopefully the lost beam is distributed over a large enough section not to cause serious damage, but even then you get to hear an audible "WWHHuuuummmpp". The idea that a bunch of particles can get themselves heard is a little frightening when you think about it.