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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?
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.
I believe someone already make an artificial black hole about two or three years ago... It was located at the New York Stock Exchange.
Sue Hawking, duh.
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.
These scientist want to study structure which anything can enter, but nothing can leave? /dev/null
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.
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
"Any life forms that are stupid enough to try to create black holes on their own planet deserve what they get." Should the world hold a democratic vote to whether or not we want to participate in the ultimate Darwin Award entry? I mean, FUCK... I can just imagine all the aliens laughing there asses off.
Life is not for the lazy.
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.
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