Slashdot Mirror
Investigating Artificial Black Holes
Robber Baron writes "I remember years ago watching a cartoon in which an inventor had managed to create 'portable holes.' Now along those lines, according to this story in the Christian Science Monitor, scientists are on the threshhold of developing the 'do-it-yourself black hole' (Well, no, it's not quite do-it yourself as you need a pretty large collider to pull it off.) They're hoping to use the new Large Hadron Collider at the European Center for Nuclear Research to create many tiny black holes and observe the Hawking Effect as they dissipate. Keep your shotgun handy though, as they are more than likely going to open up a portal into another dimension and all sorts of nasties are going to come pouring out."
Keep your shotgun handy though, as they are more than likely going to open up a portal into another dimension and all sorts of nasties are going to come pouring out.
dear lord, haven't we learned our lesson from Doom, Stargate and Half-Life ?!
science, it's done nothing but cause trouble.
Mike
What is that? Doesn't sound like a unbiased news source to me.
I assume this won't happen, but can anyone explain why?
What if hawking was wrong, and hawking radiation doesn't kill them off?
Then how are we going to stop them from eating us all?
Keep your shotgun handy though, as they are more than likely going to open up a portal into another dimension and all sorts of nasties are going to come pouring out.
Is this the precursor to the next latest-greatest ID FPS hit?
University - a box of academia nuts.
You are late. They were expecting you in the test chamber ten minutes ago. Suit up and proceed there immediately.
I remember years ago watching a cartoon in which an inventor had managed to create 'portable holes.
That was Wile E. Coyote in the Roadrunner, first introduced in the 1952 cartoon "Beep Beep".
I think the Acme corporation has the patent on them, along with Jet powered Roller Skates, Coyote-sized Slingshots, Dehydrated Boulders, Do-It-Yourself Tornadoes, spring-loaded Boxing Gloves, dropping Anvils from Tightropes, Jet-propelled Pogo sticks and Unicycles, and Fake Railroad Crossings.
Just don't put your portable hole inside a bag of holding.
multidimensional worlds ...
parallel universes , trevelling *faster* than ligth (assuming average velocity and a non uniform density universe)
we 're already prepared ... what is ipv6 for ?
my ex always told me that she was like a black hole... attracting all type of shit... I guess I wasn't enough of a shit, so I managed to escape. :)
So...
a) How long does it take one of these micro blackholes to decay. and...
b) Are they positive that a blackhole will just decay nicely. The big bang only took one particle supposedly, so...what happens when a blackhole pulls in upon itself? Boom?
"Sed Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?" -Juvenal
Please tell me I'm not the only one to read that as "Large Hardon Collider."
It must be the Slashdot->Goatse.cx->Giver thing. I need to get out more.
This will help us with our project.
:)
Since the dawn of time, Man has yearned to destroy the Sun...
Thousands of microscopic black holes escape the collider and orbit the center of the earth, gradually sucking in matter and growing. OK, if someone has a time machine in the works, I'll shut up, but come on... it's right there in black and white!
Motto over the European Center for Nuclear Research:
;)
"Liberate tutemet ex inferis."
No wonder the Christian Science Monitor picked this one up.
The coolest voice ever.
I believe someone already make an artificial black hole about two or three years ago... It was located at the New York Stock Exchange.
Well, from what I have learned from dilbert, things that have the capibility to create artificial black holes make great excersise machines... remeber the gruntmaster?
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
What would be worse, a gray goo scenario gone bad in the laboratory, or a home-made black hole gone bad?
I choose the black hole.
Imagine if Acme had ever made an operating system.
*rubs chin*
Naw, couldn't be...
The coolest voice ever.
This reminds me of the book Hyperion by Dan Simmons. In Hyperion, a black hole ends up falling into the center of the Earth.
Think about it this might be the event that all geeks around the world have been training for their entire lives. I say let the demons come, we'll put up one hell of a fight
This could easily wipe out every living life form on Earth. Why? just for some stupid experiment.
Maybe the reason why seti has not found any alien life forms is because they run experiments like this and wipe themselves out.
We should not play with the fabric of time and space.
http://saveie6.com/
I remember years ago a scientist warned about the dangerous in performing atom accelerator experiments, which might lead to total disaster. I forgot the details but move along this line, someone might create a mishandled black hole and all of a sudden we suck into a tiny dot. Then we might hear something like that:
"Hey, who tell hell could tell me what's going on?"
(a voice from 5 nano-meter away)"Sorry, I dropped the black hole on the ground...."
Someone above mentioned Acme Co. for creating this, but I also clearly remember seeing this done in a Pink Panther cartoon when I was quite young.
:)
At least they can't patent it, as there is clearly a lot of prior art.
Not only does it suck, you can get internet access.
This should be enough to pop off numerous tiny black holes, with masses of just a few hundred protons. Black holes of this size will evaporate almost instantly, their existence detectable only by dying bursts of Hawking radiation.
I had a vision of the experiment going disasterously wrong and instantly consuming the earth. Scene then cuts to a couple of very nervous scientist standing before a very pissed God saying 'Ah your Supreme beingness what actually happened was we miscalculated slightly and then some diet coke was spilled on the control panel and...'
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
These scientist want to study structure which anything can enter, but nothing can leave? /dev/null
I believe that the first weapon we get in that adventure is not a shotgun - It's a crowbar. That game had some creepy aliens.
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
why? because we don't even KNOW if there are such things as blackholes. evidence only remotely suggest that there are very dense bodies that has a diameter smaller than event horizon for our universe, but if they are singularities or not, that's questionable.
in another words, we don't know if the space really contract into a singularity - because for one, a singularity causes all kinds of problems for all kinds of theories.
Just a few monthes ago people were expressing immense interest in gravistars (I forgot the name) where instead of collapsing completely into a singularity, after the neutron stage the space being crushed will exhibit strong force outward (due to some quantum mechanics thing) where it would balance out into a "shell" or somesuch - though the shell diameter is still smaller than the event horizon.
IF the above turned out to be true, though - no blackbody radiation (as the radiation will gets trapped onto the shell) and no dissipation, which means the end of earth, etc.
Even if they are really singularities, if they emit black-body radiation is merely a theory by hawkings. We simply don't know if regular laws of phisics holds up at singularity level (that's the reason we call them a singularity, after all).
Man... I know nobel prize is a million bux and all, but risking the entire human race on it seems kinda sketchy.
I never thought there are real "mad scientist" types out there. I guess I got proven wrong on this.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
The guy made holes like he was
making pancakes. And he said
"portable hole" in a funny voice.
And he wore a bowler.
Yet another example of our dear scientists considering the 'can I' instead of 'should I'.
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
until a reputable source at LEAST mentions this. Seems very unlikely.
Natural cosmic ray (probably created by supernovae or hypernovae) are far more energetic than any puny little collision we can muster. Concerns about doing something bad because of our particle collider experiences is unwarranted; if something bad were potentially laying in wait, it would have already been sprung billions of years ago from cosmic rays events. The most energetic cosmic ray -- consisting of a single proton -- had the kinetic energy of a hard-thrown fastball.
Bugs Bunny used these to escape from E. Fudd. Nothing new about them, then :)
It was primarily NASDAQ.
You should actually read the entire series (4 books.) Best literature on earth.
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
While I don't have the links handy, I do recall hearing about this at least a year ago. The hypothesis goes that if much of the force of gravity is confined into other dimensions all curled up on each other, then when you collide two particles with enough energy, they would enter a regime where that gravity could affect them, and immediatly collaps down into a black hole with the mass of the two particles. Such a hole would evaporate immediatly by Hawking radiation and be observed as a spray of random elementry particles. And if the hypothesis is correct but Hawking was wrong, we are screwed anyway, because the relevant energies hit the planet quite frequently in the form of cosmic rays, creating mini-black holes in the upper atmosphere all the time. If they didn't decay, then they are somewhere inside the earth even now.
...one of these physics experiments (not necessarily this one) just vaporises the earth? Its not like they understand everything yet so how can they be sure its safe?
Maybe it works just like they think it will or maybe they will create an artificial big-bang or something.
Or am I just too damn paranoid?
--- No 16-bit support in Vista? Half of our modules still use it! ---
from all the other reasons, it's because a black hole doens't have any magic "sucking powers"
Beyond the event horizon, it acts as any other massive body.
A black hole the same size mass as the sun would be much smaller, but at our distance from it, gravity would be the same, so the earth would continue to orbit...
That kind of thing.
So would a little black hole be dangerous? Sure.. you have to have a way to keep it in place, with electric fields or whatever... but other than that... it's not really a big issue.
Beyond it's event horizon, a black hole is just another massive object.
"But wait", I hear you say, "Has anyone considered that creating artificial black holes might not be the best idea?" The idea of creating black holes in the laboratory has to give one pause. I mean, how can anyone resist the urge to imagine future headlines like "Artificial Black Hole Escapes Laboratory, Eats Chicago" or some such thing? In reality, there is no risk posed by creating artificial black holes, at least not in the manner planned with the LHC. The black holes produced at CERN will be millions of times smaller than the nucleus of an atom; too small to swallow much of anything. And they'll only live for a tiny fraction of a second, too short a time to swallow anything around them even if they wanted to. If it makes you feel any more comfortable, we're pretty sure that if the LHC can produce black holes, then so can cosmic rays, high-energy particles that smash into our atmosphere every day. There are probably a few tiny black holes forming and dying far above you right now. So I think we should all relax, fire up the Large Hadron Collider, and get ready for a view of the universe that we've never seen before.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
If you're going to throw that out, would you care to explain to those of us who aren't quantum mechanics experts what Lamarck's theorum is, you stupid socially inept person.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
Here is an old czech folk song (it actually rhymes in original)
"We used to have a grandpa and he was getting pretty old. One day in July - early morning -
he went into the cellar - to get a pitchfork
for haymaking. But he never made it back, it looks like that he has vanished for good.
Chorus: "We have a small black hole in the cellar.
It eats everything it finds and it has no restraint. Grandma, please don't go there for coal - or it will eat you too - and police will never ever find you!"
Scientists came from far away - and from near too, grandma is nervous and beats us all, the kids. She is all alone there to do the cleaning and taking care of kitchen - while grandpa sits in the cellar and is infinitely heavy.
Chorus: "We have a small black hole...
Don't worry grandma, please don't despair, my wife is making the lunch. Her food is usualy quite terrible and I am gonna use it to feed the black hole. So I fed the leftovers from lunch to the black hole and it threw up everything including the grandpa. Then I took the chaisaw and cut the hole into pieces. And so the man won again over mysterious forces.
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
Reminds me of Stephen Donaldson's 'Singularity Grenades' - highly unstable, highly experimental and never appropriate for use.
this has nothign to do with singularities. What a black hole is to an outside observe (just an event horizon) and what's INSIDE IT (a singularity, a shell, a universe?) is irrelevenat... the area beyond an event horizon is undefined.
FOr any given energy density, there is a diameter at which there is an event horizon.
Things no more get sucked into a black hole than thigns get sucked into a star, or any other gravity well.
Its not right to wipe out our own existance just for some stupid experiments.
The idea of course is extremely absurd which is why the funding this happened. If only people knew the potential risks of such a disaster.
I noticed alot of cern is based in belguim so I am going to search the web for some belgian government email addresses.
http://saveie6.com/
First they want to replace our GPS, now they want to open a gateway to hell. Please Stop Europe!!! Just fade into the history books.
Bombs - even nuclear ones - are familiar and have limited range. Certain types of GMO's may be scary (release an oil-eating bug to clean up a spill and it eats all the oil in the world, etc.), but lots of places have survived the introduction of non-native species, which seems similar.
Something about the idea of a hole that can eat all the matter on the Earth (& solar system, etc., etc.) is scarier than other technologies with potential for "oops". Even if the physics says it "shouldn't" be a problem, it's scarier.
I'm usually sympathetic to the idea that smart folks who've done the math should be given deference when it comes to making decisions about implementation of new technology, but in this case a popular reaction of "Oh, Shit! Don't do that!" feels well-warranted.
You think anyone's going to click on a link entitled http://go.fark.com/cgi/fark/go.pl?location=http:// goatse.cx/loopback.jpg?
Something I've wondered about: Electrons definately have mass, and seem to have a zero physical size.
So, why are they not black hole singularities with infinite mass? Why don't they evaporate in a puff of Hawking radiation?
--- Learn XForms today: http://xformsinstitute.com
According to the Jesus theorum, black holes do not exist. God don't make no junk.
That's a great idea! Europe already is one giant black hole!
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
I honestly don't think I've ever seen this many paranoid, uninformed, and irrational responses to one slashdot story. And I am aware of how many of those there usually are.
People almost sound as if ms were trying to make these black holes.
The way they're creating "colliding antiprotons with protons" happens in the atmosphere all the time. So if it does not cause a castastrophe then it more than likely will not cause a castastrophe later because if the Hawking effect was bogus and black holes did not decay one of those created in the atmosphere would get to the center eventually and destroy it. *insert thunderclap* Seeing as that has not happened yet I'm not all too worried. No one says the experiment is going to succeed in creating a black hole anyway.
Ignorance kills, complacency kills, hatred kills, but usually not the ones guilty of them.
James P. Hogan has written about artificial black holes in at least two of his novels. In Thrice Upon a Time, scientists accidentally created a bunch of microscopic black holes tha turned out to be stable, and proceeded to destroy the earth, pac-man style. In The Genesis Machine a machine can create small singularities and turns out to be useful as a doomsday weapon.
Ok, so it's just sci-fi and the author ignores (or misunderstands) relativity, causality, and quantum mechanics. And it's still a good read. But -- if these guys are actually going to go creating singularities, could we make 'em set up shop on the moon to do it? I'd rather not have a black hole in my back yard. Yes, I know the article makes some reassuring statements about the incredible smallness and short life-span of such a thing. But, seriously, splitting the atom led to the Cold War and we're all still sitting on enough nukes to turn Earth into a warm glob of glowing goo. I hope we don't rush headlong into this singularity thing -- what if it turns out to be more dangerous than fusion bombs?
Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.
Is this research sponsored by Union Aerospace Corp, an arm of the most powerful conglomerate on Earth? I'm going to keep my Glock handy.
Apart from Microsoft-toting / Linux-bashing ABCNews articles, Moody was famous for his dire warnings that the Brookhaven Labs experiments were going to destroy the universe. Now that we're going to actually make a black hole that can turn the earth into swiss cheese, where is he to sound the alarm? Well, he got fired from ABCNews, so no such luck. [I did a quick check and, remarkably, even though his last book got the worst reviews in Amazon history (like Jayson Blair kind of bad), he's at it again with a new book about Seattle.]
There are plenty of retards on Slashdot
There's no such thing as "Lamarck's theorem", and even if there was, any work by Einstein on classical black hole dynamics has been superseded by Hawking's quantum mechanical work.
All I know is CmdrTaco isn't really a commander, and Cowboy Neal isn't really a Cowboy. But they are both flaming homosexuals.
If you want to travel through other dimensions and faster than light than you might want to research way beyond the sub particle worlds of higs bosons where our laws of physics may not apply and where everything happens instantaneously. I am god.
book in question: "Earth"
lesson Learned? Make the !@$#%$^!&! things OFFPLANET, especially since we don't have any convienet ray-guns that can push/pull with gravitational forces. and yes, he knew enough to invoke the Hawking Radiation ideas too.
"It takes a very long time to count to 2 in binary." ~'Fourlegged'
Even if is dangerous, what are you going to do about it? NOTHING. Besides, if it does go out of control no one will care... because they'll be dead.
A lot of people are mucking up a fuss about the black hole sucking everything up. It should be pointed out that these claims are by and large ridiculous.
It seems to be a mistaken idea that the gravity of an object is determined by its density. This obviously isn't so. Two electrons collided in a collider at high energy still have the mass of two electrons. Even if they are crunched into a "black hole" the gravity is not enough to suck everything into it anymore than two electrons sitting next to each other could suck everything up.
Just speculating, but since black holes do evaporate, and the smaller they are the faster they evaporate, I wonder what the implications of evaporation would be in the presense of an acretion disk.
Given that in the process of evaporation, a black hole emits radiation, at some point the radiation pressure from the evaporation would balance out the force of gravity pulling matter into the black hole so then the black hole might stabilize in size.
Surely they'll have named that limit already, but I don't think it's the same as the eddington limit.
Or perhaps there won't be a limit here because the cross section area of the acretion disk would be so small compared to the surface area of the event horizon. (yes, I think that incoming matter would have to form a disk and not form an acretion shell)
First thing thing that came to mind was, of course, the ACME holes (not black holes actually, but wormholes if you've seen that episode of farscape). The second thing that came to mind however, was an episode of Pinky and the Brain where they created black holes in a jar and sold them as garbage dispasals IIRC.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
There were people that said we should not test atomic energy.
Send one atom into another it splits creating a domino effect of splitting... will it stop?
We know so little about black holes...because we've actually never seen one.
We've observed behavior in which a black hole phenomenon would adequately explain.
Doesn't mean there isn't another explanation.
As far as the end of the world...I'm having troubles fathoming a black hole such as this having that immense and limitless effect.
The Hawking effect makes sense.
But then again, we're assuming we know anything.
clifgriffin > blog
Is that nobody has mentioned Earth yet. Does nobody read David Brin anymore?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It was obviously a reference to that obscure little game, you know, DOOM, in which a portal opens to hell and demons pour into our dimension. It's a good thing you didn't get all excited and fly off the handle because you didn't get the joke.
Never fight naked, unless you're in prison...
Calm down people <> Do you know where your towel is? Got some peanuts and a couple of beers ready?
;)
:o
:^)
Right, listen...
We geeks are safe from harm...because we are
already familiar with the disaster-scenario's that this could bring about. We are PREPARED! Yes indeedy. SF writers have been pondering this stuff for years...
All we need to do is check for a solution in one of these books <<peers at ginormous bookcase stuffed with SF novels>>...the question is...which one of these novels holds the CORRECT solution?
Hmm, alternatively we can load up some cheesy FP computergame and thats bound to tell us how to beat the spawn of evil!
I'm sure the Spawn of Eternal Evil will wait half an hour while I finish a game of Doom looking for the solution
Hey, you all know how to fire a shoulder-mounted rocket-launcher, right?
If all else fails...we can ask the white mice to order a new planet for us
Hey, here's an idea. Why don't they pack a bunch of nuclear or chemical waste around the point where this thing will be created. Create it, the waste gets pulled in, and then it starves and disappears. Ta-da, no more waste. Maybe not practical, but if you're going to be creating them anyway...
THAT's what they were doing in the Half-life intro. Everything is so much clearer now...
-------
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
The gravitational attraction between two objects is dependant on mass linearly, but is also dependant on the distance between those two objects.
Gravitational Force = GMm/r^2
Where G is the gravitational constant of this Universe, M is the mass of the larger object, m the mass of the smaller object, and r the is the separation between the center of the two objects. [an objects gravity is "centered" at it's center, thus the gravitational force at the center of the earth is infinite (r = 0)].
It is true that black holes do not create increased distortions of the gravitational field by altering size (initially). They do so by shrinking the radius of the object. If you double the mass of the sun, but keep its radius the same, the gravity you'd feel on the sun's surface would only be doubled. If, however, you half the sun's radius, but leave the mass the same, then the gravity you'd feel on the sun's surface would be quadrupled (because r is 1/2, the denominator in the formula is 1/4).
I believe what you were trying to say is that the effective field of gravitation for these black holes would be so small as to be insignificant, and you're right. Gravity decreases exponentially with an exponent of 2 as the distance between the two objects increases; thus, for black holes of the mass these guys are creating, the field in which they would warp the space-time continuum would probably be atomic -- e.g., after about the radius of an atom, their gravitational force becomes insignificant.
Of course, this is all a shotty analysis of it, as Newton's Laws of gravitation don't even hold true for describing planetary orbits, and even Einstein's Theory of Gravitation (the warping of space-time) breaks down at a singularity.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
This all sounded familiar, so I did a little checking in google. Sure enough...
F 30 E13FE3F5C0C728DDDA00894D9404482
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=
Dated 9/11/2001. Same colider, same questions posed, same concerns. Or did I miss something new in the CSM article, such as them specifying actual experiments?
I believe that would be the "I'm an Anonymous Coward with a brittle understanding of quantum physics and a chip on my shoulder" theorem. But perhaps I'm mistaken, and I doubt he'll be checking back in to clear up his post. *shrug*
Einstein did believe that black holes were physically impossible, but -- drawing on my own very brittle understanding of quantum physics (push too hard and it collapses) -- his reasoning was based on the idea that stars could not collapse to a stable point just above the Schwarzschild radius; the problem with his thesis is that a black hole (according to theory, below) collapses beyond that point , rendering his correct observation irrelevant. (The radius of the singularity explains why a black hole is black -- ejecta from the hole, emitted below the Schwarzschild radius, can't escape the gravitational distortion.)
In any case, Einstein's paper on this subject, published in or around 1939, happened to coincide with and was generally superseded by the work of Oppenheimer and Snyder, who used general relativity to show the effects of mass collapsing through the Schwarzschild radius. It wasn't until the 1950s that Wheeler actually coined the term "black hole," but the theory was set.
Since then, we've seen a fair amount of observational evidence that suggests that black holes exist, but, although most scientists (and laypeople) accept their existence,the jury is still out.
"Freedom is kind of a hobby with me, and I have disposable income that I'll spend to find out how to get people more."
If I understand things correctly, we all crave "karma" - if you have bad karma, you get reincarnated to try again. The ultimate goal is blissful non existence, right? (AKA Nirvana). So, wouldn't it be a great thing if everyone could achieve this all at once? Maybe it's the gin...
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
This sounds like a really great experiment to test way out there theories, but say he's wrong and black holes don't evaporate and it sucks the whole planet in killing us all? That would suck. (pun intended)
- Sherman
Those bloody high-energy physics guys will not be happy until they manage to turn their big particle accelerators into giant, glowing holes in the ground. Why don't they go do something useful, like violating Newton's Laws or whatnot.
Just remember, "Black holes are where God divided by zero."* It makes sense that the Christian Science Monitor should be the first ones to make a black hole, all they have to do is pray hard enough and God will create one for them.
:)
Right?
*quoted from Steven Wright
Sapere aude!
BLACK HOLE CREATES YOU
What would be worse, a gray goo scenario gone bad in the laboratory, or a home-made black hole gone bad?
Hmmm. To be Crushed or to be Eaten?
Damm I hope Hawkings is all he's cracked up to be!!!
I stole this Sig
Read Steven King's "The Mist" (a shortstory).
This is a bad idea.
These doomsday stories always come up when a major step towards new science happens, a few years back they said the same thing about the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider on Long Island and Comedy Centrals "Daily Show" even had a program about it (it was great). But now that this project produces major science results, nobody is interested, maybe one should start a doomsday rumour again toget noticed :-)
and YES I'm one of them working there
Mmmm, those strange charm always give me a large hadron.
One moment you're using a line printer as a dumb terminal with the paper feeding into a black hole, and then you pretend that it was the rest of us.
/dev/urandom >> /dev/lp_blackhole
cat
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
You all need to look beyond the cover story. This is really just a giant conspiracy. The French (les macaques capitulards bouffeurs de fromage), feeling the stinging contempt (and reduced commerce) of new Europe, the UK, the US, and the coalition of the willing, are going to attempt to use the time-warping effect of the black holes to go back and change their UN vote so as to lighten the pressure of their tounge's on Saddam's boots. Even they apparently feel some shame over the discovery of 10,000+ person mass graves, and billions looted from Iraq by Saddam et. al., condeming enormous numbers of ordinary Iraqis to death. I just hope that their ego-manical weird-science attempt to salvage their reputation will not destroy the earth. :(
Even if Hawking radiation doesn't exist, the black holes created will still make atomic nuclii look huge. To it, the earth will appear to be a harder vacuum than space does to us and once it balances its electrostatic charge meals will be few and far between.
But even if it aborbs a neutron or proton + electron a million times/second - so what? How long until it weighs even a gram? As a rough estimate, I seem to recall that Avogandro's number is something over 10e23, and if a gram is maybe 10e20 particles and the consumption rate is around 10e6/s, it will take 10e14 seconds - over 3 million years. And it will still be far, far smaller than the subatomic particle it consumes.
But that assumes that the blackhole even stays in our neighborhood. Escape velocity from earth - from the solar system! - is nothing compared to the velocity of these particles before the collisions... or most of the particle sprays coming from them. There's basically no chance that the black hole would emerge at essentially no velocity.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
The iLoo? I know its a coporate joke, but I had to say it.
Nos una. Nos unique. Nos victum.
...that this experiment sucks?
Snarkiness is inversely proportional to wisdom because it emphasizes feeling right rather than being right.
Maybe this is the big bag theory. Some creatures way back before us and before the big bang accidently annihilated themselves, thus causing life to recycle. (Just a crazy thought)
Also, maybe to be safe they could do this in space. Or are the machines/devices/etc. too large to send into space?
Question everything.
First Om!
Any BH that is created in this manner would dissipate fairly shortly, and not be a threat, as there is not enough matter to 'feed' it. A though though, what if the newly formed BH was showered with matter (a stream of subatomic particles)...
Would it be possible to add enough mass that the BH's gravity started to affect the world in a meaningful way? By consuming the collider, switzerland, etc.?
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
Oh, and this ship will not sink.
There are probably a few tiny black holes forming and dying far above you right now.
So what signature are we expecting? If you don't know, you won't see it. Do we see it now from way up there? Wny not?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
You beat me to to correcting all the Wile E. Coyote posts. As much as I love old Wile E. he didn't use portable holes.
Now steel barriers that spring up out of the road just as you come flying along with vitamin-fortified legs....
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
"You don't need eyes to see where we are going."
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
..so what's next? Say they successfully build one that lasts just a tiny amount of time and evaporates? Now think, these are uber geeks. UBER brand geeks, but still geeks. What DO geeks do? They get all hyped up, want to build a bigger/faster/ longer lasting one. If and when that works, they repeat this process. This is just what geeks do after all.
... nuts.
Now, who's going to tell them to stop, and when? You can see this discussion now "Well, it's working good now, we'll just slap some more watts to this baby and...." And you KNOW some insane military goofus with billions to throw around with some black budget funding will think "hmm, sounds like we could make a WEAPON outta this thing somehow, hmmm" and that's EXACTLY how those guys think and do, too.
The little experiment is nothing *as it stands now* but the progression of the experiment is sorta
due to the fact that a black hole has
1) mass
2) a non-zero temperature*,
*granted, it's still lower than background radiation temperature usually - but non-zero.
it satisfy the definition of a blackbody and would emit blackbody radiation. At least, by the laws / theories of known physics.
In fact, black holes have been called "the perfect blackbody," no?
You can say that the blackbody radiation from the black hole is actually hawkings radiation, etc. But I think the official word is that the blackbody radiation is manifested as hawkings radiation, or produced via hawkings radiation, or somesuch - for one they two share the exact same spectrum**
** not quite sure on this. correct me if you would.
Now, one thing that nobody seem to have touched on is the fact that a evaporating black hole destroys information, which cannot be allowed in the current view of physics. This opens barrels of cans of worms for physics, and gravistar is one of the solutions that came out to help out on the "information loss" part of the theory.
In the end, even you'd have to agree that WE DON'T KNOW. and no, the author doesn't know for sure either. He can say a lot about how high-energy collisions are happening in upper atmosphere, but we don't know that they are, and we sure as hell don't simulate that kind of environment in a collider (much more concentrated particle beams, anyone?).
so, while maybe by what we know right now, black hole evaporates (let's just ignore information theory for a minute there), but the fact is we don't know that for sure, and I might sound like a sissy to say that we should wait until we can outrun a possible blackhole swallowing up earth (as unlikely as that might be), but fsck - i think it's better to be sissy than be looking for trouble that can get everyone killed, yes?
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Ah, but how much mass do you have to have in a singularity? Will one electron compacted so terribly be able to pull in a second that gets too close? What's the event horizon for a neutron? Any mass is infinitely dense if it occupies no volume. Hmmmmm. Tell me why this won't suck!
-Best Beavis voice - This sucks, it sucks, it really really sucks. Ahhhhhh!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
He was alluding to the popular FPS game, DooM, where an experiment gone wrong opens a portal to another dimension (or Hell, or maybe they're the same thing, never was quite sure about that part) and demons, monsters, and Pauly Shore come out to kill you. It was a fun game and a lot of people on Slashdot played it and were expected to get the joke.
I mean, I can see how you might expect that kind of reporting from a Christian news site
Actually, despite the name, the Christian Science Monitor isn't really a religious publication. It was founded by the woman who founded the "Christian Science" cult, which is a bizzare distortion of Christianity (and is only tangentially related to either Christianity or Science).
But its purpose has always been to provide a balanced realistic source of news as a public service. I don't know how well they succeed but they have independent reporters all over the world and they're quoted by an awful lot of people, so I suspect that they must at least do a pretty good job.
The fact that no one has come back from the future in a time machine proves that we will destroy ourselves before one can be invented! More than likely, it will be with an experiment like this. The only way to ensure the survival of humanity is to immediately end all scientific inquiry.
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
Maybe I'm wrong, but I seem to remember something along the lines of this:
Because a black hole is affects both space AND time, the closer you get to the core, the longer time stretches out. Therefore, even if the entire Earth were to begin being sucked into a black hole created by Earthlings, it would actually take "forever", rather than being instantaneous.
Either way, if we create a black hole and it destroys us all, so be it.
Natural selection in action.
It could be worse, at least if we all get sucked into a black hole there won't be any Danielle Steele novels left behind to embarrass us.
And for God's sake -- never turn a Bag of Holding inside-out ... !
-kgj
Wasn't it in the Hyperion series (by Dan Simmons) in which the backstory included a scientific research project -- the Kiev Project -- which created a number of small black holes which sunk to the earth's core, destroying the planet over a period of several hundred years?
TANSTAAFI: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free iPod.
I fear that this post may be lost in the numbers surrounding it, but it needs to be said. First off, I'd like to give an example of how utterly tiny this thing will be. If the sun were to turn into a black hole instantly, its event horizon would have a 3km radius. For the sun, that's extraordinarily tiny. According to the article, this thing should have the mass of a couple hundred protons. That's, in case you can comprehend these numbers, 1.67*10^-25. Now, the radius of this bugger will be that times 1.48*10^-27. Yeah. That's FREAKING TINY. 2.47*10^-52 tiny. Many many many orders of magnitude less than the Planck distance.
Now, to address another issue. Hawking radiation is a pretty solidly entrenched idea. Particle and anti-particle pairs do form in space - the existance of the particles which are a part of it have been experimentally verified through the Casimir effect, which is Googleable. So worries about that not happening are pretty unnecessary. And, as many others have stated, these microscopic black holes have been forming and evaporating all the times due to cosmic rays right above our heads.
For those who wish to learn more about black hole physics, I have to suggest an excellent source for the layman: Jillian's Guide to Black Holes. She can explain things in simple terms, and has some hefty gravitational wave and Penrose diagrams for the really interested.
Oh, and P.S.: If the world really is sucked up by a black hole, it'll be a saving grace for all of the physicists who have been extraordinarily wrong for the past three-quarters of a century. ^-^
And yet another P.S.: For those physicists out there, what interesting things start to happen with black holes at scales this much past the Planck length? I believe that I've read somewhere about quantum gravity showing up heavily, but I'm unsure. =)
This statement is false.
This reminds me of a story I read once, "Bobo's Star." Basically this boy grew a miniature star in an indestructible container (he got it by mail-order) and it wasn't the right shape, so he kept feeding it until the sun was suddenly a black hole and the indestructible container suddenly wasn't. Super short ending, 'the world got eaten.'
:-D
I love being reminded of fun Sci-Fi stories, espceially ones I haven't read in 5 years
- "Nobody came out that night, not one was ever seen. But Old Man Stauf is waiting there, crazy sick and mean!"
Shotgun - Check Handguns - Check Armor - Check Victory Whiskey - Check Black Hole to release the hordge - soon my prescious
as I write this.. Afterall I need practice dont I ?
Where is that damn Chainsaw ?? And does anybody know where I can find a bloody BFG in the middle of Alaska ?
Rapid Nirvana
ok, i'm kind of new, but at the point at which the two particles collide, isn't there a tiny pseudo-vacuum surrounding them where the mass of two used to be? and wouldn't this itty bitty vacuum suck the surrounding gas into it... and into the baby black hole, and so on, and so on? or do the theories tell us it would instead decay so fast as to not be able to pull much of anything?
Since theory doesnt assuage your spasing, heres some empirical evidence:
1) The energy used collides with Earth daily. Cosmic rays are much stronger, and so far, I've noticed no 'sucked up into the sky' disasters
2) Even if it doesn't radiate, the gravity holding it together is less than the electromagnetic forces. It'll fall apart either way.
On another note, I will be selling 'Black Hole Insurance' at very resonable prices. Please inquire for rates.
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Anybody care to bet whether the black holes will be stable? I'm betting they will simply dissipate.
If they gobble up the whole universe, I'll pay one million dollars to each any every one of you, honest. If not, then you'll owe me.
Karma: -2147483648 (Mostly affected by integer overflow)
With any luck they'll create a mini black hole, it'll fall through the ground, and they'll just say "oops" and go onto their next project. 20 years later there will be great earthquakes and soon planet will give off several large explosions, the first of which killing all the survivors of the quakes, as it's sucked into the tiny black hole at its core.
A black hole that small radiates so quickly that you'd have to shower it equally quickly to keep it stabilized -- not likely, especially since we have no way of even capturing the thing.
We got HOSTILES!!
Not long ago, I attended a symposium where the presenter made a decent case, using some of the same arguments from QM that Hawking used, plus some other bits (sorry, don't have the notes), that Hawking Radiation would actually be forbidden by other physical laws. While the stuff at Ph.D. level and beyond me, it wasn't for the rest of the audience - and they couldn't poke any holes in it right away. Or by the end of the Q and A session.
Is it fringe? Sure. Be nice to verify, though, in the face of what could be a world-ending event. If black holes exist sans Hawking Radiation, we'd be in quite a bit of trouble upon the production of even the smallest one. Probably wise to check that little problem out. I'm not advising doing anything wacky and superparanoid, like building it on the Moon
Scientific method is great, but when it comes to doing planet-wide experiments, you get a sample size of 1 and no control group. Oh, and no "do-overs." This is Chicken Little, signing off.
In fact, the brand new relativistic heavy ion collider is working quite happily. You're thinking of the controversy over some very small leaks of radioactive materials a few years back- the lab didn't handle the public relations very well on that (gave an impression of not being fully open) so it made a stink, but the health consequences for the surrounding community were pretty much negligible.
Curtains for windows?
Totally emersive game play!!! Wow, sierra was right, this ones gonna be killer!
My sausage tree didn't grow, does that make me a bad mommy?
Top 3 Things You Don't Want To Hear At The European Center for Nuclear Research:
3. Oops
2. You are turning into a Penguin. Stop it!
1. Is that Rob Malda over by the button that says "engage" on it?
If worst comes to worst, you best re-familiarize yourself with old betsy.
Ronald said nothing. He flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse, and rode madly off in all directions.
As a type-13 planet, I guess it was a matter of time before we annihilated ourselves by crushing our planet into a singularity.
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
Oh well. If they manage to blow up the whole damn planet, that would be one hell of a trip!
That said, it means that an electron is bigger than a nucleus. Don't believe me? Look at the structure of an atom. Big electron, tiny nucleus. Large-mass structures like you and me are only large in size because we are held apart by the electron shells.
Which leads to an interesting error, and makes me wonder if they really know their science as well as they say:
Even a person will [provide the mass to make a black hole] do, although you'd have to cram them into the space occupied by a single electron. (from the article)
If he had wanted to say this, he could have said as easily "atom" instead of "electron". So it looks like he was saying "cram them into a space 1/1000 the size of a hydrogen nucleus", since an electron is 1/1000 the mass of a proton. But in that case, he needs to say "cram them into the space of an nucleus of mass 1000u." Less impressive-sounding, but more impressive.
Not confused yet? I am. So I'm going to stop talking now.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
I am a black hole you insensitive CLOD!!!
um... I'd like to veto myself on grounds of stupidity... the earlier comment is incorrect, sorry.
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
The article doesn't make clear that this is an extremely speculative prediction which requires some highly nonstandard physics results. Indeed, if this accelerator (or cosmic rays for that matter) actually produces black holes it will undoubtedly be considered one of the greatest and most astounding physics discoveries of the past 100 years.
The paper that started all this speculation (which is now presented as fact more often than not) is http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/hep-ph/0106219. In that article, the authors explain that the model requires a version of the universe that has ten dimensions, arranged in such a way that the Planck mass, where gravity merges with other forces, is about 10^3 GeV. Standard physics says that the Planck mass is at 10^19 GeV. Their assumption is 16 orders of magnitude different from the conventional wisdom.
The paper above concludes with the comment, "Collider study of black hole creation would certainly be an astounding pursuit". Indeed, the authors and experimentalists would be guaranteed Nobel prizes if black holes actually form.
Unfortunately, popular articles gloss over the speculative nature of these predictions and we are told that the LHC "should be enough" to create black holes, and that cosmic rays are "probably" creating them right now. The levels of certainty implied by this wording could not be more misleading.
That should read, "I haven't detected any bias in the rest of the newspaper."
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
...being poured into a black hole.
Literally.
How very sad.
Sunlit World Scheme. Weird and different.
Far away on Galaxy X, a group of protestors have got together, to protest against the use of black holes as an energy source. A little late though. Closing time gentlemen.Dr. O.D. Benway (Certificate on request)
1. Create blackholes with Large Hardon Collider.
2. Make a cluster.of em.
3. Feed it pictures of Natalie.
4. Oh wth - Chuck in a goatse pic too.
5. ?
6. Profit!
Ahem. If we are all instantly sucked into nothingness, will our souls be sucked in, too?
They are supposed to do that on MARS.
It's in every sci-fi novel.
Irrelevant news and morons using moderation to mod down what they disagree on. 2018 resolution: so long.
Many people have already pointed out that black holes are not going to destroy the earth, but I guess people might be interested in this, which is a simulation of what a black hole event might look like. It shows an end-on view of the the ATLAS detector (picture), with most of the noise and rubbish taken out.
The curved, coloured lines are tracks left by charged particles. The green ring is the electromagnetic calorimeter, whilst the red ring is the hadronic calorimeter. Calorimeters just measure energy - so the histograms radiating out show how much energy was deposited at each point. So by looking at the histograms you can get an idea of how energetic the track was. Hope that makes sense!
Incidentally, the picture is zoomed to show the interesting detail better. The detector is extremely large! Look here for a picture that shows people standing next to it
Ummmmm, guys? Wouldn't a BH fall to the center of the Earth and consume it eventually? I mean, what if the little darling doesn't evaporate the way Hawking predicts?
I don't want to see one of these things get loose and destoy the earth. It is were I keep all my stuff...
everything to do with black holes is all theory, even their existance is a theory based on effects seen in space, not the cause. Just look at the atom bomb, it had a much bigger effect than anyone originally anticipated. The only thing known for certain about these so called black holes is that there is a huge amount of gamma radiation being released from near the center, which is trust out way beyond the edges of the hole itself. Has anyone even considered or calculated how much dangerous radiation this thing will create, and if at all they are successfull, if the amount of energy released can be contained, or worse still if it would cause a cascaide effect? Once again, think atom bomb which reacts by compressing a very small about of uranium.
n/t means "no text".
Hi,
That's, in case you can comprehend these numbers, 1.67*10^-25. Now, the radius of this bugger will be that times 1.48*10^-27. Yeah. That's FREAKING TINY. 2.47*10^-52 tiny.
Don't scientists use units there, or did you just figure out at 10^-52 it simply doesn't make a big difference whether it was from a meter, kilometer, or millimeter? ;-)
I have a little theory of my own. Let's assume that the world is a multiverse that "splits" indefinitely at each quantum event. The splitting creates apparent randomness in the world from the perspective of observers. An observer can obviously only observe events that do not cause his destruction.
Now, if the observer wants to observe a certain event, all he has to do is hook a detector of that event to a machine that destroys himself. For example, lottery results are affected by quantum-level randomness. Hence, if you hook lottery info service to a bomb that blows your head, you will always win in lottery.
However, while this works nicely in personal level, it is somehow depressing to think that in most universes, your friends will see your head explode and you're gone forever. They'd be sad. So, take your friends with you! Make it better, take the entire world with you! All you need is a machine that destroys the world if you lose in lottery. (Talk about bad losers, ehm?)
The downside of such machine is that it would probably not work. You see, it might be more probable that the machine burns a fuse than that you win in lottery.
We could use the Miracle Machine to make things better in the world too! For example, hook it in stock market and make it cause destruction of the world if the markets crash. It could also make us safe -- make it trigger if a nuke blows in your home country (or anywhere else). We would eternally observe world peace!
I somehow get very nervous when a scientist wants to test a theory, when if false, the test itself causes destruction of the world.
"'Ooooooh' and 'aaaaaah', that's how it always starts. But then later comes the running and the screaming." -- Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park
nuclear bombs are so 80s...
I know you are psychotic, but please make an effort.
"Good news everyone!"
I'd hate to see the episode where the debt collectors come round to break his legs.
Acme is a great text+mouse+windows user interface framework for programmers on Plan 9 (where Linus gets his better ideas):
e / index.html
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/acme/acme.ps
http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/Using_acm
Also available for other unices as Wily:
http://www.cs.yorku.ca/~oz/wily/
Anssi Porttikivi / app@iki.fi
As some one who was in Amsterdam friday and brussells saturday and live in London (originally from oz) standards there do not suck. Amsterdam is a beautiful city where the majority of peole get around on bikes (being dead flat helps) not to mention the coffee shops. Brussells was great too. It has the best beer in the world. No arguments there. I have been to alot of places. Sure they have dodgy areas but so do all cities. The only thing they lack is space, which is a bit annoying. But then again New York is hardly spacious.
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
Wuhp, stop evrything,
I didn't order a bowling,
Activate the discombobulator immediately, Gordon must die!!!!
Q: Isn't it time for a weather control device.
Then we could generate a catastrophic lightning storm like in C&C RA II
I'd think that the MPAA has the rights to Event Horizon. Maybe everytime they create a black hole they have to pay the MPAA.
"THe point of no return is the Event HorizonTM.
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
Did anyone else watch the spiderman series in which a scientist (british if i remember correctly), created a machine to create black holes for transportation, then the green goblin got the machine yada yada yada ...... time to get a life
Damn it!
Where's Howard the Duck when you need him!?
"Before humanity, the stars shone throughout the heavens. After humanity [has gone], the stars will continue to shine"
So you admit that they are deliberately fudging (for trade balance reasons) when they invoke the "Precautionary Principle" on the genetically modified foods debate?
this guy has posted the same thing about 5 times on this article.
and SOMEHOW people keeping modding his posts to +5 insightful.
the difference is that people bookmark the "Large Hardon Collider", but tend to "Block images from this Site" the first time they hit goatse and vow never to make the same mistake again...
a) It's in italics...that means the submitter said it, not the editor.
b) It's a joke. Science mishaps resulting in dimensional portals and nasty armies of demons coming through are a staple of video games and science fiction. Doom and Half-Life are prime examples of this.
c) You're just a goddamned moron.
Referencing an old Nethack saying:
"Black holes are the reason why nature abhores a vacuum...they suck!"
I wish to apologize this post.
Asuming it all goes ary, and the planet is sucked into oblivion, it will be a long (very long) and painfull death as time will slow down exponentiontially as you get closer and closer to the center. All while being turned (very slowly) into a piece of spaghetti. :)
If in fact this "blackhole" does manage to suck us all up... Perhaps we can land somewhere very far away, possibly nowhere near a sun (energy source), thus leaving us in absolute darkness for a couple of minutes, at which time our entire planet will freeze, and shrivle up... ahhhh, gottah love science :-) OH NO! That would mean the end of slashdot!
Problems? Or is it solutions? What science needs to do is find a way to pull things back out of black holes. Selectively would be nice. That way, you've got a place to put all your stuff. (With the option of getting it back out of course) :) Just thinking of George Carlin here.
There is a series of Sci Fi books that I particularly like by James P. Hogan. In those books, the (friendly) aliens use artificial black holes. One use is, they create a microscopic black hole and use its wormhole effect to send radio signals light years instantly. There was a spy on Earth and the main character sniffed him out by noticing that his house was built out of material necessary to support a massive weight, way out of proportion to the actual house. Of course! It was the weight of the microscopic black hole used to transmit data back to his headquarters, light years away.
Just see the comment. Nuf said.
...until someone sucks up a planet.
For those of you into activism about important scientific subjects, like how to ban things, need to check out this . We need to ban dangerous things!
They suck!
like the triangle that i live in.
I've left to find myself. If you happen to see me, please, keep me there until I return.
HA! YOU SUCCEED!!
Hey do you think they would sell me one of those things so I can toss my big fat greek mother-in-law into one of them.
It would have to be a big one not a small one like the article mentions.
With my luck the other dimension on the other end would send her back, and she'd fall on top of me...
I love every bone in her body, especially mine!
Uhh, Steve, have you seen my black hole? I left it right here, where the desk used to be.
bitch - slapped.
Tip: ask nicely on alt.binaries.multimedia.cartoons.looneytunes for a VCD copy and we might get lucky. There are guys there with a huge archive and encyclopledic knowledge of all the WB stuff.
(What I really wanna see are the banned "Sloan Foundation" cartoons - the German immigrant mouse explaining "mass produktion und mass consumption" to his friend from the old country. There were three of them, I think. The one with the mice explaining capitalism while being chased by Sylvester, and two more with Fudd/Sylvester talking about why he should invest his inheritance.)
If they must create a blackhole, I suggest they do it at SCO, because they suck. Imagine the company being sucked by something that reminds the blackhole bomb from the arrival. That would be fantastic.
--
Karma is overrated, whoring is ok.
If the black holes are so tiny that a particle can't fall in, how exactly are they going to produce any hawking radiation?
Shoot 'em down boys....
;). The virtual half-particles will come out of nothingness, all in the same direction, propelling the ship forward. No thermodynamics problems, as the black hole is the energy source, created by pouring energy from somewhere else in the first place.
Artifical gravity: generate several micro-black holes, accelerate them in an annular confinement track to close to the speed of light. Their relativistic mass will rise, gravitational effects, etc. Gravity at your feet but not at your head, though.
Photon torpedoes: create a confinement structure that breaks on impact (duh!).
E-Z fusion: create two concentric confinement tracks. Run black holes in both of them exactly out of phase. This should create a focus at the center that could squeeze plasma to all hell.
Black hole drive: figure out some way to direct Hawking radiation
Just a few B.S. pop science ideas tossed off without having RTFA.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
How many of the effects that will limit the possibility of the black hole gaining mass have been verified?
Stop the brainwash
Well you thought wrong, dick! I'm old and even I know cosmology better than you!
Huh? In a matter-antimatter reaction, 100% of the matter is converted to energy. Not 10%.
See more here
-T
Scientist dude in white coat: "According to our calculations, the mini black-hole created will not be of any danger. In fact, it will have only 1/1000000000 of the force required to suck the planet into a screaming oblivion"
Black-hole generator activated
Nerdy scientist voice fading into the distance: "Oops, I um, forgot to carry the one"
> dear lord, haven't we learned our lesson from
> Doom, Stargate and Half-Life ?!
>
> science, it's done nothing but cause trouble.
Not to mention Lexx. Don't they know that that setup will allow them to measure the mass of a Higgs particle and thus ensure earth's destruction.
Sign, where's a big bug when you need one....At least I have my towel.
"what did you do with the other half?"
I gave it to Jeremy."
"Good, he can keep his mind in it..."
I'm probably not recollecting word for word, but i do very much remember the cartoon with the holes that he developed like ink and used it to dispose of things... and i remember the monty python cartoon where they used it to catch a criminal, rolling it into position so he'd fall in, and then moving it so he'd fall out into jail...
Thank you again, slashdot, for proving me to have no childhood that was not in some way based in early tv...
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.
...that the universe in a nutshell would definitely be within its Schwarzschild radius. Who is this Hawkings fellow, anyway?
Liberty uber alles.
Maybe we'll get the biggest Darwin Award ever!!!
http://www.darwinawards.com/
Colosse.
Logically, just about every step of human invention and evolution is a means to our eventual perfection. We learned to speak, to survive better, we started civilization to survive better. We developed nukes to kill, but it eventually lead to the mutual prospect of distruction, and therefore brought some form of peace after/during the coldwar.
If we are capable of creating a black hole which could suck our entire world into it... statistically, logically it must be a form of evolution. So just sit back and relax, and for those of us who are immortal... be prepared for an eternity of floating in space, planetless... with nothing but your own consiousness to keep you company for the eons it might take for you to bump into a habitable planet.
-- noodle
If a black hole encountered a cat, 1 of 2 things would happen. Either the never ending supply of FUR would cause the black hole to explode, or the FUR would cause the black hole to become infinitely large, thus devouring the entire universe.
Christian Science Monitor? Who are you fooling?
Hey, this is a type 13 planet.
It's just a matter of time now.
There is a sci-fi novel titled "The Crone Experiment" in which an american scientist (Paul Crone) accidentally creates a few black holes that don't dissapate. As he is observing one, it dissapears and can no longer be measured. He forgets about it and figures it fizzled out. What actually happened is that it reached a point at which it was so massive that it fell through his containment apparatus and began to orbit the earth's core, cutting through the crust at regular intervals. Eventually it was found and scientists determined that its orbit would lessen as it grew more massive, and it would gradually suck in more and more of the planet from the inside out until earth was gone. All that would be left in earth's original orbit would be an infinitely dense dark spot the size of a basket ball, with a lonely moon spinning around it. Melodrama aside, is this a likely scenario? Will black holes that appear to dissapate actually be falling into earth's core? Or is it impossible to generate small black holes that dont dissapate withing microseconds of creation?
TallGreen CMS hosting
Well, if you work up from the radius of the event horizon and the mass that is inside you get something that I tend to call critical density (Haven't seen it mentioned anywhere), which in my mind is the critical density that matter has to reach in order to make a black hole. But, what could be with more density than the elements of matter itself? What can have more density than quarks? So, shouldn't quarks be black holes since they have the highest density possible?
We shouldn't have to worry about nasties popping out our end. We'd be the nasties popping out the other end.
:)
From what I've been reading in some technical Sci-Fi writing guides, to travel through you start by going through the black hole and exiting via a white hole.
So Orbox the 3 Headed would be sitting down to breakfast when a flood of nasty humans poured through the portal into his dining area. Poor Orbox
from my limited understanding of nukes, they work by compressing specific types of mass enough to fuse. Anyone know if there's any potential in that to do what the collider is going to do?
for Half-Life 2.
BOOM! ZAP! FLASH!
"My, Gordon, I never thought I'd see a resonance cascade!"
and the black hole didn't dissipate after all?
oh gosh! like that old game, Out of This World!
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
A BH is created, and recorded serveral times, and eventually enough study and experimentation occurs that stable and managable BH is maintained. Soon BH power stations, engines, galactic drives, and Cadillac Headlights are created. A few years later, they discover how to release regulated energy in large amounts and can shrink the black holes as needed, allowing all of the earths waste to be immediatley turned into clean reliable energy. Polution exists no longer, and there is no longer a need for coal, oil, or any other natural resource.
Sounds very nice huh?
100 years later, one of those dark matter particals passes directly into any one of these now common black holes, and creates an instant implosion destroying everything and essentually flushing the space toilet. Beings in dimension 79 scoff, and post comments to snargdot.com about them crazy earth beings.
That's funny. There haven't been any American scientists in centuries. It's all Jews, Indians, Chinese and Europeans doing all the thinking for you.
Now go back to McDonalds and don't forget to smile when the Indian pulls up in a Mercedes to order his coffee from you.
"I for one is" huh... Back to grade school with you, fat ass american!
So what if hawking is an alien in disguise and this is all just a clever plan to bring over his alien buddies from planet Melmac and take over Earth?
Just divide by zero.
...are undeniably much worse than goatse.cx
what is wrong with you people?
Large Hard-on Collider
sounds like a new picture series from goatse.cx
perhaps even scary?
I find it quite sad, all this paranoia about black holes eating away the earth. It is plain us who are eating away the earth.
Is it a bad idea to create black holes in a lab? It is a bad idea to ride your car every day to work, or to produce so much waste. It is a bad idea to grow economically.
We are the black hole which is sucking away all the natural resources on the face of the earth. What we fear reading about these experiments is really happening.
linked
The relevant bits are in the first paragraph. Basically, if we make a black hole with the same mass as a small dog, then the Earth will not get sucked in by it, just as the Earth does not get sucked in by a small dog.
Now that I've written this, I'm not actually sure that it applies to your question, but I got to link to the Straight Dope, anyway.
Your brain is not a computer.
OK, the black holes (BH) produced would be tiny, well smaller than an atom. The only way they can be made at this energy (1TeV) is if there are extra spatial dimensions which are very small, at least sub mm. Gravity ~1/r^2 doesn't hold in this regime, it'll be something like 1/r^(n+2) where you have n extra staial dimensions. We have no idea whether they'll be meta-stable and last "forever" (but be so small we won't worry about them cos the earth is likely to have already attracted a few), or meta-unstable and "immediately" decay into normal particles. look at arxiv.org and search for "semi classical black holes" in hep-th and gr-qc if you want to know more. SLAC is another good resource. The moral of the story is, these black holes are almost certainly likely to be harmless, and if there are extra dimensional aliens/demons they will be too busy worrying about being eaten by bacteria and other microbes too much to star in popular computer games =).
Artifact by Gregory Benford
Disclaimer: Yes I believe the Bible. No, I don't put any stock in the "Left Behind" style interpretation (map prophetic events to modern events, use a hammer to make it fit) except as a form of Sci Fi/Fantasy entertainment.
Revelation 9
On second thought, maybe I will volunteer for a shuttle ride during such an experiment. Wouldn't that be ironic if the last remaining humans are 7 shuttle astronauts?
Table-ized A.I.
I got the joke. They made it sound like the article was saying something like that.
That coward who said "only when it has infinite momentum" is referring to DxDp=hbar.
That electron cloud is not just a visualization.
The electron doesn't just take up a point. It exists in all those points at once. Thus, it can absorb a light ray that is bigger than a point. Indeed, you throw a whole bunch of electrons into an "electron gas" (that is, free electron cloud of a conductor), and the electron can recieve and transmit from a space the size of the whole conductor.
The energy of that light wave is typically absorbed as a packet by *all* the electrons in the conductor. But it also can be absorbed by each of the electrons in the conductor.
As a side note, very often, if the visualization works, it is because there is something inherently true about it. Plum-pudding models *don't* work for atoms. However, they *do* work for nuclei. That is because the structure of the nucleus involves a bunch of quarks continuously decomposing at the boundaries of the nucleus.
The electron cloud of a Hydrogen atom exists at all points, because of the virtual particle creation and destruction that goes on throughout the entire field of the electron cloud. Conservation occurs, but the electron is virtually and mathematically at all points in the cloud, and all points in the cloud recieve the photon at once. Therefore, it isn't just one point.
The electron is really that large.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Is there any chance that Dr. Freeman and his crowbar will be available and onsite at runtime? You know.... Just in case!
You know the old story:
Biologists think they're Chemists,
Chemists think they're Physicists,
Physicists think they're Mathematicians,
Mathematicians think they're God.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Whether they are big enough to be called black holes or just big enough to mimic the density, don't they STAY HUNGRY? I mean - a singularity - no matter how small - has some depressing implications for the not so dense matter of our planet. I'd give the earth about 2 weeks if we simply let these singluarities fall to the core when we are done with them.
Am I the only one paranoid enough to bring this up? Sam Neil be dammned! we're all gonna die!
No, it doesn't violate conservation of energy. First of all, energy is conserved on average, but can vary according to Heisenberg's principle. Because of that, you can get pair production followed by pair annhilation. Think of it as energy in the form of light converging on a spot, followed by pair annhilation, producing light leaving that spot. That happens all the time. You don't need to actively focus the light.
The light can even be background radiation, which you aren't going to be measuring, so it will seem like energy is not conserved over a very short time, Dt=hbar/DE. Maybe it really isn't conserved within that limit -- I'm not going to get into that issue. But pair production followed by pair annhilation happens all the time. Less often, but also common enough, is pair annhilation followed by pair production.
It also happens all the time, since it is the mechanism of the strong force (read Powers' book "Superforce").
As for the binding force on quarks, it is lowest at close range, and strong at long range, thus the name "strong force". But since E=F*D (energy = force * dist), at a certain limit distance the potential energy of the quark will have been raised to the point that it can produce a quark/antiquark pair.
Whatever.
So why is it true that with Hawking radiation, you can destroy one member of the pair and the other survives?
well there actually IS a way to destroy blackholes:
imagine superfluid or even ice hydrogen, cooled to
a few 0 Kelvin. if you drop this into the blackhole, it would rip it apart. the mathe included (here NOT) is difficult, put the super-cooled hydrogen would implode bevore it reaches the event horizon, creating a space-time distortion, which would breach the event-horizon.
die folge waere dann, dass das schwarzeloch ein teil seiner energie durch diesen "raumriss" verliert, aber das ist heorie. danke!
bablefish-altavista for translation.
real physics is writen about in german anyway!