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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."
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
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?
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.
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...
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.
Imagine if Acme had ever made an operating system.
*rubs chin*
Naw, couldn't be...
The coolest voice ever.
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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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.
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.
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.
These scientist want to study structure which anything can enter, but nothing can leave? /dev/null
The guy made holes like he was
making pancakes. And he said
"portable hole" in a funny voice.
And he wore a bowler.
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.
However you are correct in that we have no idea if Hawking radiation even exists. If it did, we would observe GRBs of a specific type, yet we haven't. I think we should look for these GRBs some more before we start cooking up black holes.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
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
The name of the Christian Science Monitor might lead those unfamiliar with it to think that it is a Christian news publication focused on science. Actually, it is a news organization associated withis a small religious group known as "Christian Science" (offically "The Church of Christ, Scientist"), which has very little in common with Christianity.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
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
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.
Here is that paper from the RHIC (the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider) at Brookhaven National Lab:
http://www.bnl.gov/rhic/docs/rhicreport.pdf
It it titled "Review of Speculative 'Disaster Scenarios' at RHIC".
However, they did shut it down for a bit to "upgrare some detectors". Probably true, but I did notice that instead of banging gold ions against gold, they are banging gold against deuteron. Makes you go "Mmmmmmm". I, for one, am glad that someone is thinking about this and perhaps weighing on the side of caution.
I still would feel better it was done beyond the orbit of Mars or further!
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?
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First of all, the idea is that black holes dissipate via Hawking radiation, not blackbody radiation. It's been a few years since I read Hawking's papers on the subject, but they are quite different things. It has something to do with quantum fluctuations and virtual anti-particles being pulled INTO the black hole being the same as normal particls falling OUT of the black hole. That's how I remember it, but read his works, it's explained pretty well.
Second of all, higher energy impacts occur all of the time in space and in the upper atmosphere (which the article points out!) so either 1. Even that much energy is not enough to actually create a micro-black hole, in which case no problem or 2. They evaporate somehow, in which case, no problem.
Finally, these things will have very little mass. A penny does not attract near by mass towards it with any noticable effect, so these won't either. Just because they are very dense does NOT mean they have an immense gravitational field.
Here is a simplified way to look at it while ignoring blackbody and Hawking radiation. A black hole exists because at some point enough matter got together so that its gravitational field counteracted electrostatic, strong nuclear and weak nuclear forces, and it collapsed into a mathematical point. It remains a point because its gravity remains strong enough to counteract these other elementry forces. Now, if the blackhole was created by something else counteracting these forces, such as a high energy impact, then, once it is created, the gravitational field is NOT strong enough to counteract the elementry forces, and the black hole would dissipate.
IANAP
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
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.
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.
The linked article answers this pretty compellingly: if the LHC can make quantum holes, then any other equivalent source -- like, oh, say, the solar wind -- can do the same thing. That means they're either being created all the time (in which case we can probably safely ignore everybody's favorite doomsday scenario) or they aren't being created (in which case, it would awfully nice to understand exactly why.)
OTOH, maybe IHBT, IHL, HAND.
Does anybody remember Larry Niven's short story "The Hole Man"?
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'
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)
I know! Let's form a committee of the people in this thread who don't know squat about physics (but have strong opinions), and let them decide what research gets done and what doesn't!
My cousin is a physicist at Brookhaven. I'll try to get you a heads-up if the world is about to be destroyed by the eggheads.
By the way, it's great to see you posting again, Charly. How's Algernon?
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
Read Steven King's "The Mist" (a shortstory).
This is a bad idea.
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.
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.
Thanks for the auto-degredation of Christian people doing scientific research as not solid.
However, I don't believe they are the Christians you are seeking. If you do as much research on their journalism skills, you'll find that they are not the same conservative's that you might call Christians.
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)
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.
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?
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.
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
They suck!
Ah, now I undestand the real reason of those experiments. Politicians all around the world are certainly eager to destroy information they don't like. Now finally, physicists seem to have found a way to reliably do so - therefore there's certainly a great interest of manufacturing those devices, as well as researching if they indeed destroy information.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Actually, it is a news organization associated withis a small religious group known as "Christian Science" (offically "The Church of Christ, Scientist"), which has very little in common with Christianity.
Well, right up to that last part. Christian Scientists are Christians; after all, they believe in the resurrection of Jesus. That ultimately is what sets "Christians" apart from "non-Christians." They also consider the Bible to be canonical, they simply have in addition a book - almost a commentary - called Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures that defines how their doctrine relates to the Bible.
If the Christian Scientists had been around in the 4th or 5th centuries, they might have been considered heretics by the Orthodox Christians and Catholics. But they would be considered Christians by all except the tiny minority of evangelicals who deny that even Catholics are "Christians" because they do not share their doctrinal views.
...that the universe in a nutshell would definitely be within its Schwarzschild radius. Who is this Hawkings fellow, anyway?
Liberty uber alles.