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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."
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?
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.
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If our theories are wrong, then we can't know what all the effects of this will be, unless we do the experiment.
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:
Actually, the scientist is completely wrong. There are much higher energy reactions going on naturally with cosmic rays and such. Quantum black holes, wormholes, etc are created all of the time. And destroyed just as quickly.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
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.
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.
It was primarily NASDAQ.
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.
No... the big bang didn't just take "one particle".
It's just that if we follow the maths backwards, we end up at a point where all 4 dimensions (Or more, depending on your theory) are infininitely small, and there is no such thing as time or distance.
Matter is mostly empty space, so much so, that every time you touch something, there is a small amount of overlap before the electromagnetic repulsion of the electron shells is enough to stop it. If they are dealing with what I think they are (no I haven't RTFA yet), these are probably micro black holes that are subatomic in size.
Even though the mass has colapsed, the black hole still has the mass of its creation (from the hadron collision). Think of it this way, if the sun suddenly collapsed in on itself and became a black hole (It doesn't have enough mass to do it itself, but lets just say.), the earth and all the other planets would still orbit it. They would not spontainiously be drawn to it more, for the sun, despite its change of state, still has the same mass.
Taking these two points, the gravity effect on the surrounding matter is not enough to draw it into the black hole because gravity has very little effect on the subatomic level. So, the black hole would have to practically wander into other particles in order to gain mass. Except matter is mostly empty space, so that it is unlikely. Even if it does gain mass by colliding with another subatomic particle, the chances of it not disapainting before it smacks into another are very slim. I am not exact on the theories, but I think the probability is a technicality kind of like the one where it is technically possible to run through a wall without disturbing the wall (it is how diodes work).
You may have a point if it does not dissapate, but even then, it is not as bad as you think.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
Please educate yourself about the matter before complaining about it to CERN. Scientists doing research in these areas are much more knowledgeable about the dangers of such experiments than the average Slashdot reader is, and I assure you that they do not want to kill themselves.
Now, if you have a degree in Physics, it might be different, but as it is, you are just misguiding the public. There have always been fears of disasters from new experiments: for example, many movies were made about monsters being formed by radiation. And furthermore, the fear of genetic engineering, etc. Most of these are caused by the lack of education in the public about such things, and people who think they know more than they do. Please, don't speak so strongly about things you don't understand. It can have very unfortunate effects --- such as spreading fear of genetically modified foods, and of radiation, to look at the past.
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.
I've read at least four independent derivations of Hawking radiation, using different methods. They all agree. There is also experimental evidence of Hawking radiation in analog models of gravity. (These are physical systems -- solid state, acoustic, etc. -- that reproduce the kinematics, but not dynamics, of general relativity. Hawking radiation depends only on the kinematics, at least for large holes that don't shrink appreciably.)
Who was the presenter, and who were the people in the audience who "couldn't poke holes" in this claim?
The funny thing is:
When God divides by zero, it damn well divides, physics be damned.
(Hence Black holes)
The media likes to play up risks to make it sound Mysterious and Exciting and Dangerous.