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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."
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.
The reference to the Hawkings Effect is the key. Steve H. has a well accepted theory that black holes leak. The smaller they are the faster they leak. (It's basically a quantum effect, if the black hole is low enough mass the singularity is close enough to the event horizon to let some matter tunnel out and escape. The event horizon shrinks further until the black hole evaporates.) If all goes right the holes we could create with our limited technology couldn't last long enough to cause any problems. This of course is all just theory, if he's wrong there will be hell to pay.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Despite it's name, and the fact that it is, indeed, owned by Christian Scientists, the Christian Science Monitor is actually considered a reputable paper (scroll down for CSM), with high-quality journalism. It has a more centrist or even liberal bent, not Christian right.
"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
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.
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