Slashdot Mirror
Lab-Made Fireball May Be a Black Hole
MoogMan writes "BBC News reports that a lab fireball may be a black hole.
From the article: "A fireball created in a US particle accelerator has the characteristics of a black hole, a physicist has said. The Brown researcher thinks the particles are disappearing into the fireball's core and reappearing as thermal radiation, just as matter falls into a black hole and comes out as "Hawking" radiation." More information available from the NewScientist article (subscription required)."
Some time ago, I had one of my minions to compose a list of possible ways of destroying the Earth. Back then, he rated the "microscopic black hole plan" as follows:
You will need: a microscopic black hole having enough mass not to evaporate instantly. Creating a microscopic black hole is tricky, since one needs a reasonable amount of neutronium, but may possibly be achievable by jamming large numbers of atomic nuclei together until they stick. This is left as an exercise to the reader.
Method: simply place your black hole on the surface of the Earth and wait. Black holes are of such high density that they pass through ordinary matter like a stone through the air. The black hole will plummet through the ground, eating its way to the centre of the Earth and all the way through to the other side: then, it'll oscillate back, over and over like a matter-absorbing pendulum. Eventually it might come to rest at the core due to the resistance of the matter it passes through, but it'll have riddled the planet full of holes long before then. Then you just need to wait, while it sits and consumes matter until the whole Earth is gone.
Earth's final resting place: a singularity of almost zero size, which will then proceed to happily orbit the Sun as normal.
Feasibility rating: 2/10. Highly, highly unlikely. But not impossible.
However, now it seems that we're a step closer to accomplishing this, so i might have him revise the list.
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
Does anyone else think assassins should be called in to prevent this experiment from creating a real black hole that swallows up the whole planet in minutes?
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
It would be good to know if they had destroyed it yet.
Euh? Does that make it 10 million seconds?
mund freud.
i call it a hawking fireball
welcome our new Kwisatz Haderach Blackhole overlord!
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
This is a great start of a doomsday novel!
Great holes of fire!
Eh I thought they had worked out that hawking radiation was not matter coming out of the hole, but another part of the accretion disc. Did I pick that up wrong?
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
we should all know in about 4.2 minutes whether it is really a black hole or not. It was nice knowing all of you. Thanks for all the fish.
We eat everything we can find, then something else come out from the other end?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
These tiny blackholes will fall into the core of the earth, and slowly grow one quark at a time, but at an accelerating rate. In a 100 million years or so, it'll come back to haunt the descendents of the super dolphins that'll overthrow the advanced alien race that'll conquer the robots that'll destroy us.
The same thing happens when I eat at Taco Bell, but no one has claimed my stomach is a black hole.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
This sounds familiar....Pass me the crowbar
The e-print of Nastase's paper.
Look!
I just want sharks with frikken laserbeams attached to their heads!
That sucks...
if John Titor predicted this...
...that dozens of novelists and scriptwriters will scramble to their desks when they hear about this?
"When the gold nuclei smash into each other they are broken down into particles called quarks and gluons."
and it also says that at these speeds and energy levels (sorta redundant there), gravity is not a concern for these tiny blackholes. So this is my question: if its not a critical level of mass causing an event horizon, disallowing anything but x-rays and the fore-mentioned radiation to escape.. what exactly is causing these black holes to form? Does it have somethjing to do with the petential energy actualizing on such a large scale? (a sortof critical speed instead of mass)
someone help!
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
I can't be the only one to think that creating black holes on or even near earth is a really bad idea.
However, even if the ball of plasma is a black hole, it is not thought to pose a threat. At these energies and distances, gravity is not the dominant force in a black hole.
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
Perhaps scientists always eventually make gamma-ray-bursts or black holes in particle accelerators that blow us up before we can get off the planet.
A puzzling signal in RHIC experiments has now been explained by two researchers as evidence for a primordial state of nuclear matteA puzzling signal in RHIC experiments has now been explained by two researchers as evidence for a primordial state of nuclear matter believed to have accompanied a quark-gluon plasma or similarly exotic matter in the early universe. Colliding two beams of gold nuclei at Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in New York, physicists have been striving to make the quark-gluon plasma, a primordial soup of matter in which quarks and gluons circulate freely.
However, the collision fireball has been smaller and shorter-lived than expected, according to two RHIC collaborations (STAR and PHENIX) of pions (the lightest form of quark-antiquark pairs) coming out of the fireball. The collaborations employ the Hanbury-Brown-Twiss method, originally used in astronomy to measure the size of stars. In the subatomic equivalent, spatially separated detectors record pairs of pions emerging from the collision to estimate the size of the fireball.
Now an experimentalist and a theorist, both from the University of Washington, John G. Cramer (206-543-9194, cramer@phys.washington.edu) and Gerald A. Miller (206-543-2995, miller@phys.washington.edu), have teamed up for the first time to propose a solution to this puzzle. Reporting independently of the RHIC collaborations, they take into account the fact that the low-energy pions produced inside the fireball act more like waves than classical, billiard-ball-like particles; the pions' relatively long wavelengths tend to overlap with other particles in the crowded fireball environment.
This new quantum-mechanical analysis leads the researchers to conclude that a primordial phenomenon has taken place inside the hot, dense RHIC fireballs. According to Miller and Cramer, the strong force is so powerful that the pions are overcome by the attractive forces exerted by neighboring quarks and anti-quarks. As a result, the pions act as nearly massless particles inside the medium.
Such a situation is believed to have existed shortly after the big bang, when the universe was extremely hot and dense. As the pions work against the attraction to escape RHIC's primordial fireball, they must convert some of their kinetic energy into mass, restoring their lost weight. But the pions' experience in the hot, dense environment leaves its mark: the strong attractive force (and the absorption of some of the pions in the collision) would make the fireball appear reduced in size to the detectors that record the pions. According to Miller, looking at the fireball using pions is like looking through a distorted lens: the pions see the radius as about 7 fermi (fm), about the radius of an ordinary gold nucleus, while the researchers deduce the true radius of the fireball to be about 11.5 fm (Cramer, Miller, Wu and Yoon, Phys Rev Lett, tent. 18 March 2005).r believed to have accompanied a quark-gluon plasma or similarly exotic matter in the early universe. Colliding two beams of gold nuclei at Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in New York, physicists have been striving to make the quark-gluon plasma, a primordial soup of matter in which quarks and gluons circulate freely.
However, the collision fireball has been smaller and shorter-lived than expected, according to two RHIC collaborations (STAR and PHENIX) of pions (the lightest form of quark-antiquark pairs) coming out of the fireball. The collaborations employ the Hanbury-Brown-Twiss method, originally used in astronomy to measure the size of stars. In the subatomic equivalent, spatially separated detectors record pairs of pions emerging from the collision to estimate the size of the fireball.
Now an experimentalist and a theorist, both from the University of Washington, John G. Cramer (206-543-9194, cramer@phys.washington.edu) and Gera
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
I'm glad this fireball/black-hole thing wasn't THAT much of a success. I'd hate to have to hear that same giant-sucking-sound again that we heard during the 2004 Election...
"Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important." (Lisa Hoffman)
Last time I went hawking radiation through my email marketing business, that Mr. Mumma fellow decided to sue me.
Online citizen journalism from the inner city: The View From The Ground
I'm curious if DHL, the delivery company, may be funding this. IIRC they did have talk about using wormholes to delivery packages faster.
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." [Thomas Jefferson]
We all know the only way to get rid of a black hole is to detonate a nuclear device less than 20 feet away from it. This will cause the wormhole to jump to another stargate and the world will be saved.
Is this where the demons and imps come through the black hole, killing everything in sight? Well.. at least it's at Brown...
This sounds very similar to my arse. It is dark. Particles disappear, later to re-emerge through the hole as thermal radiation, which I too have been calling "Hawking Radiation". The other guys in the lab love sending probes to "Uranus" to check it out first hand.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
there is a sci-fi book on this,
sorry, can't recall the title,
one of the 3.99 wally world specials..
talks a lot about waldo type robots-- they realize what's going on, (it keeps punching holes thru the planet as it rotates) and stop it by moving an asteroid to precisely pull the black hole thru the top of an arc into the asteroid..
one element you may not have considered-that was in the story- the oscillations taper down and soon it's just sitting in the core- dead gravitic center, sucking everything in, and growing exponentially.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
In all seriousness, is it possible that, in the spirit of science, these guys actually create something that the entire solar system falls into? No, I am not a paranoid shiver-bunny (all rights reserved)but I am curious, as we get 'smarter' about physics and all the other stuff that StevenH would say if he could actually talk, that we just don't know what the fuck we are fucking with and it all gets sucked into the new hole Bob just created? And why not? Where did the other black holes we seem to be able to detect come from? They came from somewhere, because they do exist, which means they CAN be created.
A most overlooked advantage to owning a computer is if they foul up there's no law against wacking them around a bit.
I for one welcome our new singularity overlooooooooooooooooooooooooooooorrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.....................
From the article:
.....................
"However, even if the ball of plasma is a black hole, it is not thought to pose a threat. At these energies and distances, gravity is not the dominant force in a black hole."
Those were the last words we've heard from New York now..
We'd just like to offer our hopes and prayers to anyone in the area..
We have no idea how fast this is spreading, but at the current rate, it should hit..
what..
that can't be right..
When you get there, you can stop reading. :p
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
/
//irony
a black hole. yeah, thats gonna be handy in the coming apocalypse.
not.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
who can save us from these "scientists" that are bent on terrorizing the world with black holes
I think that time has come for some of us (obviously not all :) to say:
Goodbye and thanks for the fish!
Just look at Uranus!
My life is an open book ... up to a point.
Run for your lives it's Black-hole-zilla.
Actually I remember reading about this project last year, the end of that article said "there is a very slim chance that this could result in the complete destruction of all matter in the universe"
VERY SLIM! That is way too big a chnace for me!
I'll sleep soundly tonight knowing the black hole formed in NY is "not thought to pose a threat". Very comforting.
it would gain mass at a ?cubed? rate of growth- each doubling in mass would take 1/9th? as long as the previous time-- and that time rapidly approaches infinite, and there isn't that much mass here to consume...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The President needs to be informed of this... someone transport it to the oval office so he can inspect this frst hand!
Here is the proof that time travel is possible; an article posted on April 1st, 2005 has taken a trip thru a blackhole and found itself on posted on March 17, 2005. If my theory holds true, expect April 5th's dupe on tomorrow's Slashdot queue.
I sig, therefore I was.
Or maybe not"
But he did say a thing or two about blackhole being lab-created in 2005.
We've got ourselves a second Nostradamus!
As long as the Lexx is out there, we can hitch a ride to get off of this planet. As long as Ki doesn't kill us, or Stan accidentally blow up Orlando, or any other extremely weird thing happen to us...
Never thought that a show that was essentially about two people (and a dead assassin, and a robot head) flying through the galaxy in a superweapon, trying to get laid, could be so entertaining...
Better not get your necktie caught in one of those!
Forever Peace: "the high-profile Jupiter Project is about to re-create the Big Bang". The Jupiter Project referred to a super collider of immense size.
Coincidence? I think not!
Does anyone else think assassins should be called in...
I definitely vote for Ninjas. They're way cool. And as a side bonus, (1) they can move fast enough to avoid being sucked into the black hole, and (2) they can slow their heartrate to zero if the blackhole starts to pass through their bodies. With those two skills alone, they're clearly best for the job.
Well great. We've got in our hands the most destructive force in the universe, and we're playing with it. I hope we survive long enough so I can buy a "Anti-wrinkle black hole" for my wife some day. Or maybe a "Tonka Wormhole" toy for my kid. I don't even want to know what Barbie and barbie toys they come out with.
This technology is not a toy. May cause suffocation, asphyxiation, paralysis and may crunch you into a singulatity if you stand to close when in "action" mode.
The black hole would not behave as a pendulum for long. As it takes in new matter the system must conserve momentum. So if it fell half way to the center of the earth and then gained some mass, it would lose velocity, and hence not have enough speed to make it back to the surface on the next oscillation. The resulting black hole floating around the earths core would be very interesting. Just think of all the earthquakes we'd have as the planet slowly shrank - or not so slowly...
...cacodaemons and imps start crawling out of your rift in the space time continuum.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Just put your hand in it and see what happens. On the other hand, humans now have a new place to dump their garbage.
Done. :)
USA, USA, USA, USA...
Quick, re-route the trucks!
"The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates." - Tacitus
of the sub-plot in Thrice Upon A Time
Hawking: I call it a "Hawking Hole."
Fry: No fair! I saw it first!
Hawking: Who is The Journal Of Quantum Physics going to believe?
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
Didn't John Titor predict we would discover how to make mini black holes in the near future? Maybe he was right...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Titor/
I like muppets.
how long before "aliens" show up and tell us to stop playing with "fire" because it is causing a huge disturbance in the "force."
They already have. They're scrambling to pull out stuff they've already written. Predicted sequence of events:
First we'll hear about the new black hole movie
Disney will re-release "The Black Hole" on DVD
Scientists will explain that it wasn't really a black hole after all, but the major media will not pick up the story because the movie and tv series have already been started and Hollywood will lose too much money
TV mini-series comes out just before the movie
Movie comes out
Dept. of Homeland Security informs everyone that to keep safe from a black hole, buy duct tape and plastic and cover your windows.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
I once heard a remark at some long forgotten source of unknown credibility that stated the amount you would have to jam together to consume earth before it radiated itself away in Hawking Radiation was about the size of Mount Everest. Take this with a couple kilograms of salt, mind you, as I don't recall the source.
"Here's a fun fact: the moon has turned to blood!" -- Newscaster, "Jesus Christ Supercop"
"So Long"
Fortunately, you wouldn't have had much time for the deep dark depression.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
---You can't mend a broken heart by pretending it's not broken.
No that takes beer.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Fry: Hey! Stephen Hawking! Aren't you that physicist who invented gravity?
Hawking: Sure. Why not?
Fry: Let me ask you something. Has anyone ever discovered a hole in nothing with monsters in it? Cos if I'm the first, I want them to call it: a "Fry Hole."
nt.
You can't handle the truth.
I'd believe Miller and Cramer's prosaic physics over Nastase's black holes, so I might call theirs "better" ... but are they competing explanations? I'm not sure their proposals are trying to explain the same aspects of the RHIC experiments.
That rag is always publishing the latest wacko theories as fact. Many of their published so-called articles are unreviewed fantasy by the latest professor who wants to get some recognition...
And I just bought a winning lottery ticket the same day some guy figured out how to blow up the world in 10 easy steps!!!
Actually had it been a real one of any substantial threat, I doubt you would have heard anything at all. :)
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
Go here: http://www.bnl.gov/RHIC/disaster.htm
I know it's offtopic but you have got to love the BBC. Almost always informative, no annoying adds. I have to thank the Brittish Tax payers for funding the BBC! Growing up I always heard that UK TV was crap. However, after living there a few years ago I can say it was quite good. After returning to the US I am amazed at all of the TV shows on air that are basically copies of Brittish TV. Coupling, The Office, Trigger Happy TV, The Sketch show, American Idol, Trading Spaces, Faking it, etc...
Ok, so you saw the same stargate episode I did...
-- Huh?
I only have to worry about whether I left the coffee pot on.
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
This past weekend I finally get laid and now it looks like the end of the world may be nigh.
-AC
Meh. I have too many game memories. The first thing that this brought to mind was Guile spreading his hands apart, and.... Sonic boom!
(\(\
(^v^)
(")")
This is the cute vorpal bunny virus, copy to your sig or runaway, runaway in fear!
"The Hole Man" by Larry Niven.
pooptruck
The Brookhaven National Lab located on eastern Long Island, NY gives summer Sunday tours of their facilities(2004 schedule). If you have the chance, then GO! Seeing RHIC up close if pretty damn cool. I'm no particle physicist but their tours are quite impressive and are given by the researchers themselves. Oh, and yes they have beowulf linux clusters too.
See you in New York, everybody.
Larry Niven wrote it, as a locked planet mystery story. It's in whatever the current collection of his short stories (N-Space?) is at B&N (picked up last year, now packed away).
I drank what? -- Socrates
Why isn't this just some kind of fusion/fission reaction? Isn't it a matter of comparing the mass of the system with the energy produced? Calling this a black hole seems to be a bit of a stretch.
"The Hole Man" by Larry Niven, recipient of the 1975 Hugo Award for best short story.
Did no-one pay any attention to SpiderMan 2? I mean I know Kirsten's nipples are distracting and all, but come on - it's all there!
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Want more ? Here is the Home page-Science Lite for the STAR detector
Please note also that Dr. Nastase was beating these same drums back in 99. I expect that this paper is science politics- at that level you don't want anyone to think you were wrong, so you will spend significant effort at proving your predictions right, despite evidence to the contrary. Oh, and he's not even on the project- he's sucking down other people's results after the fact.
But I remember the story. It was a short story by Larry Niven. I remember it being in one of his anthologies, either "Playgrounds of the Mind" or "N-Space". Dunno where else he it was published, but it was definitely in one or the other of those two.
cya,
john
Imagine all the people...
It was a short story in N-Space called "The Hole Man" by Larry Niven. Here karma karma, come here karma
There was a pretty good sci-fi book by David Brin called "Earth", written in 1991 or so, that had an artificial black hole escaping and threatening to destroy the earth.
I just want that FUCKING joke to disappear!
Reread the second part of that required ingredient. You still need to make it a lot bigger before it's going to work. Still, seems my mass driver may not be the thing to destroy the earth after all.
I am trolling
While we're busy outlawing innocuous stuff like stem-cell research, how about we put a lid on trying to create a black hole before someone realizes the hard way the theory of the stability of black holes is only a hypothesis?
If I understand this correctly, the dual is meant in the sense of the "AdS/CFT-correspondence", which is a mathematical correspondence, or "duality" between a gravitational theory (which may contain black holes) and a "Gauge theory", which is the kind of theory that is used to describe quarks, electrons etc.
The duality means that calculations on black holes may (possibly) be used to understand certain things about this "fireball", but it doesn't mean that the fireball is actually a black hole.
now we can make romulan warbirds. :P
aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!
*arms flailing*
Forget the whales - save the babies.
Too! Many! Nested quotes!
Argh.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
That's sorta the plot of Singularity (amzn aff warning) where the Tunguska Object turns out to have been a black hole.
Check out Earth.
These tiny blackholes will ... slowly grow one quark at a time
Dude, get with the times. Micro black holes evaporate rapidly due to Hawking radiation. That was known in 1976, more than a quarter century ago.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
I hear the hollywood copy machine churning out new catastrophe scripts already, based on the "OMG I created a black hole!" scenario. Jeff Goldblum is already cast.
Don't forget the SciFi channel direct to video: Anasquitto vs. Pythlack Hole!
I drank what? -- Socrates
they think this fireball sucks?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
You know this is a crappy TV Disaster Movie waiting to happen.
Be True, Unbeliever
..and I thought it was clever when Larry Niven wrote about it in "The Hole Man" (although that was Mars he destroyed), circa 1969.
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
Haven't these people ever seen a movie?
I've read Haldeman's story and it's related, but it's about creating a huge ambitious setup.
...
David Brin's book 'Earth' describes a black hole that 's created at laboratory scale. It's small and innocent and it can't be contained. So it escapes immediately and starts gravitating to the middle of the earth and it grows by sweeping up whatever it passes by. Very slowly at first, but then faster and faster.
This gives a nice touch to the comment in the article that the black hole is harmless
on would almost forget that the guy in the article is perfectly right.
Like i said, it's a milestone -- just like all those newly reached milestones in Quantum Computing that we're constantly told of. I do not expect it to be working and online tomorrow. Well, actually i do, but this is only a stimulus for my minions to work even harder :H
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
He dared to tamper in God's domain.
You will need: a microscopic black hole having enough mass not to evaporate instantly.
Actually: You need one big enough to evaporate more slowly than it absorbs matter on its trip. Given the tiny cross-section of even quite massive black holes and high radiation rates when they're small, this is a moderately large - and extremely massive - object.
The black hole will plummet through the ground, eating its way to the centre of the Earth and all the way through to the other side: then, it'll oscillate back, over and over like a might come to rest at the core due to the resistance of the matter it passes through, [...]
As it absorbs the matter it also absorbs its momentum. If it absorbs any non-trivial amount of material on its way through it doesn't get near the surface even on the high point of its first half-orbit.
[...] but it'll have riddled the planet full of holes long before then
Except very near the surface the planet will have collapsed the holes as fast as they form.
Also, it has to be moderately large by the time it gets to a near-stop at the core. While it's orbiting at about planetary diameter it's passing through lots of stuff. Once it's at the core it's depending on the pressure to push stuff to it. So it has to be big enough by then that the absorbtion from pressure beats the losses through hawking radiation.
But even if it evaporates it will have converted a significant mass to energy. Do this enough and something that wouldn't detectably affect the planetary radius could cause a LOT of volcanism - at some geologic time later when the heat makes it to the surface.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Goodness gracious! Great balls!
... uh ... play with it. Where's Stevie when ya need him!
Ok...
1) What if it "disappearing" is actually it blinking off for a second or two, reappearing somewhere else?
2) What if it's simply invisible to our instruments? God knows we don't have ST:TNG type equipment to properly detect these anomalies!
3) What if some bozo learns how to "sustain" these things and doesn't have the appropriate container?
4) What if it attracts the Crystaline Entity(R)?????
I am all for advancements in technology...we just have to learn about and understand it before we
Oh, and pretty please, NIMBY!
Inject.
its like they WANT to destroy the world.
The Brown researcher thinks the particles are disappearing into the fireball's core and reappearing as thermal radiation, just as matter falls into a black hole and comes out as "Hawking" radiation.
When I eat, food disappears into my mouth and then re-appears in the toilet as a glorious piece of poo. Whoop-de-doo.I think I can make a Black Hole.
I've never ever watched a single Stargate episode in my whole life (the concept of a black hole eating the Earth was familiar to me from Hyperion, though). I only linked to that web page because i saw the link on another site earlier today and just had to plug it :7
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
That'd be the short story The Hole Man by Larry Niven. It won the 1975 Hugo for short story, and is included in his collection of short stories, "N-Space."
"Let's create a black hole on the only currently inhabitable planet in our solar system." Is it me or does this just not sound right. Sure, the article says that the energies aren't enough for gravity to be an issue, but come on. I'm sure I'm not the only one who thinks this is slightly dangerous.
When the scientists started testing the hydrogen bomb, I think they questioned if the explosion would cause the atmosphere to become unstable and start a chain reaction. After all, there is hydrogen in the atmosphere.
They evaporate very fast due to Hawking_radiation Black hole produced in the collider should have lifetime of the order of magnitude something around 1e-90 second. No danger here.
This is really scary. What if Al Qaeda were to get a hold of this technology? Could they use it to achieve their ultimate mission of destroying Western civilization? Sure, they'd take themselves out too, but there would be 72 virgins waiting for them in heaven, just like there were for the 9/11 hijackers.
Hear recorded Slashdot headlines on your phone! New service beta testing. Just call (248) 434-5508
Here I come!!!! You hang in there buddy!!!
... and I shall strike upon thee with great vegeance, furious anger and a slightly positive karma.
A tiny black hole would attract almost nothing, and barely grow at all, quite apart from the evaporation effect from Hawking radiation.
Wikileaks, no DNS
Black Hole Cannons!!!!!
We just discovered how all the black holes in the universe formed...
Simple
Making black holes occurs sooner in a species technological advancement than interstellar travel.
In astronomical terms, Mount Everest isn't that big.
One article says the fireball lasts
"just 10 million, billion, billionths of a second"
Whatever the hell that means.
Another article says
"10-23 seconds"
Also, the first article states the plasma ball is
"300 times hotter than the surface of the Sun"
And the second states
"300 million times hotter than the surface of the sun"
I say it's a hoax!
Sigs are for Terrorists.
Ten times as many jets were being absorbed by the fireball as were predicted by calculations.
Hmmm...
However, even if the ball of plasma is a black hole, it is not thought to pose a threat. At these energies and distances, gravity is not the dominant force in a black hole.
Thanks for the words of comfort Dr. Octopus!
This sounds more like the work of Samantha Carter.
This story reminds of Dan Brown's "Angels & Demons", too...
One man's Funny is another man's Offtopic.
A couple other stories that dealt with small black holes/singularities loose on Earth: Artifact and Thrice Upon A Time.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
That's metagaming.
Jeez.
AccountKiller
Black holes, contrary to popular perception and their portrayal in the media (/me kicks Stargate!) have no more attractive power than the planets (or stars, etc) they formerly were, because that's all the mass they have. If Earth were replaced with an Earth-mass black hole, the Moon would continue about in its orbit just as it does now (well, minus some trivial tidal effects and the like because of mass distribution with the oceans... let's ignore those for now, hmm?) while the system itself continued to orbit about the Sun. Nothing else would be gravitationally affected any differently.
The force of gravity has an inverse-square relationship with distance. So it's one thing to be right next to an Earth-sized mass the size of Earth, while it's another to be right next to an Earth-sized mass of radius, say, three feet (Earth-sized black holes may actually need to be smaller, but whatever). You can get a lot closer, so the force you experience will be much stronger, and the effects of General Relativity (slower time, et cetera) will be significant.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
In astronomical terms, Mount Everest isn't that big.
Neither is the entire Earth.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
It was my understanding that Hawking radiation is the emission of either a particle or antiparticle from a pair of the two generated just this side of the event horizon of a black hole, where the particle's partner falls into the event horizon and the particle floats on to live another day, appearing as radiation emitting from the black hole. The pair only comes into existence with a boost from the gravity of the black hole.
If this is done in a particle accelerator, which is a vacuum, and the objects with which we're dealing are gluons and other sub-atomic particles, how can their resultant mass be high enough to generate the requisite gravity for such a thing, and from where is the pair made in the vacuum?
At the least, shouldn't the other forces override the strength of gravity by an enormous amount?
Well there's John Cramer who has just published an alternate theory explaining the RHIC resluts and has also published a couple of novels based on experimental high energy physics.
yup. That's what I posted after you got the idea there first...
what a depressing thought to see shared...
There was supposed to be an earth shattering kaboom!
So much for Illudium Q-32. Perhaps Illudium Q-33 will work.
--Marvin
Should be 10 (million billion billionths) of a second, not (10 million billion) billionths of a second....
www.wavefront-av.com
articles are disappearing into the fireball's core and reappearing as thermal radiation
In technical terms, we call that "burning items to generate heat."
Software Wars
I, for one, welcome our new overlords from
TechnoCore (until we are still alive on Earth)
This also reminds me of "Earth" by David Brin.
I doubt that many slashdotters will make it to heaven.
A Hee Haw Reference on Slashdot. Now there is no doubt that the world will be ending today. ... If it weren't for bad luck I'd have no luck at all ...
You must be a relatively old codger like me.
Can we get a picture of this thing please? Thanks!
Next time, leave the punchline to someone else.
True, but it's also a *hell* of a lot more then we can shoot through a particle accelerator as I understand it... :-)
Wiwi
"I trust in my abilities,
but I want more then they offer"
Seriously, at what point do these types of experiments become "playing with fire"? Sure, even if they created a blackhole, it may just decay instead of grow, but what if they are wrong about that? That would suck.
A modern day witchhunt.
Brookhaven NL, where the RHIC's new black hole lives, indulged in the possibility of creating a "strange" black hole about 6 years ago. 50 miles from NYC. What have they got against us?
--
make install -not war
I haven't ever heard of Titor before... but that reference in the wikpedia article was to me the spookiest prediction...
Now an experimentalist and a theorist, both from the University of Washington, John G. Cramer (206-543-9194, cramer@phys.washington.edu)
For those who aren't SF fans, I believe this is the same John Cramer who wrote the novel _Einstein's bridge_, about interdimensional gateways created by accident in the Superconducting Supercollider. No, not our abandoned project, but the one in a parallel universe where the SSC wasn't cancelled... and is poking holes into our universe in the middle of the empty Texas prarie.
Let's keep an eye out for doppelgangers of nuclear physicists mysteriously showing up in New York...
The headline of the next news id "Lab Made into a Black Hole" ...
Yet another way to destroy the earth: http://chess.captain.at/strangelets-faq.html
These tiny blackholes will fall into the core of the earth, and slowly grow one quark at a time, but at an accelerating rate.
I'm sorry, Doctor Evil, but David Brin already wrote that novel.
Turns out, anyone can slow their heartrate to zero if a black hole starts to pass through their body.
Anyone reminded of that Far Side cartoon where a black hole suddenly appears in some guys living rooms?
Reminds me of Exit Mundi's article on this possibility.
Proverbs 21:19
"... it is not thought to pose a threat"
I can't tell you how much better that makes me feel.
Next you're going to tell me the possibility of a resonance cascade is extremely remote and that you're seeing predictable phase arrays.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
I predict that Mr. Nastase is going to be on thre recieving end of a multi-institutinal, multinational collaborative ass reaming for his blatant and irresponsible sensationalistic bullshit. He goddamn well knows better than to start yapping about black holes without one hell of alot of backup. i'd bounce him the hell off the collaboration. .max
d-->nToErVtAaTvReOtN--P operator
You would probably have to vaporize the earth just to get the energy to convert a mass the size of Mount Everest into a black hole.
It was a short story in N-Space called "The Hole Man" by Larry Niven. Here karma karma, come here karma
Oh look, the karma is running away. Bye karma, bye bye karma.
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
Why think small?
We know that the distribution of galaxies is in thin sheets surrounding large voids.
Now, how do we get the voids?
Intelligence capable of creating a breakdown in fundamental physical constants must arise, if only rarely and randomly distributed across the universe; say once per million galaxies per billion years.
What happens when they build a device capable of varying some of the physical constants that create the universe as we know it?
Perhaps a new large empty void in the universe?
How would the universe look, if that's been happening? Like this?
http://http//www2.aao.gov.au/2dFGRS/
Think big!
Queue the predictable Austin Powers quotes.
an ill wind that blows no good
David Brin is great, and Earth is probably the most relevant story to this news, as part of its plot involves a man-made black hole. Besides the black hole stuff, it's a great attempt at a 50-year prediction. 50-year predictions are tricky because they need some big leaps but nothing too discontinuous, and cool because they're a time frame that a lot of us might live to see tested.
Corrected:
http://www2.aao.gov.au/2dFGRS/
should take you here:
The 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey
Final Data Release - 30 June 2003
The malformed link in the previous post somehow takes you directly to a black hole. Don't go there.
From BBC: These form a ball of plasma about 300 times hotter than the surface of the Sun.
From New Scientist: These particles form a ball of plasma about 300 million times hotter than the surface of the sun
AND
From BBC: This fireball, which lasts just 10 million, billion, billionths of a second...
From New Scientist: The fireball, which lasts a mere 10-23 seconds, can be detected because it absorbs jets of particles produced by the collision
Are they covering the same story?
When RHIC was announced, some in the scientific community expressed concern that it could do just this. The RHIC public relations crew came out and laughed off the concerns as bogus.
Specifically, they said that black holes simply cannot be created whatsoever as there just isn't enough matter or energy for this to happen. The full committee report debunking any such black hole nonsense can be found here.
So now that it has been demonstrated that RHIC's scientists were completely wrong, we're supposed to have further confidence in them how? That the accidental black hole didn't cause the earth to disappear isn't quite sufficient for an answer.
Has anyone found this phenomenom's Avatar to question it about it's intentions?
This shouldn't be too hard, as they may most likely be someone with skin that appears colored wildly, possibly mentally spaced out (if they are truely unaware of their origin or even what they are), benevolent and well intentioned, or even quite deceitful and manipulative at getting their desires (if they are aware of their origin and what they are).
As the black hole plummeted towards the core, it would accrete matter, which would keep it from accelerating so much. It would come to rest at the center of the Earth, where the molten core would be quickly consumed, followed by the rest of the planet.
At what point will the black hole absorb more from the particle stream than it loses to hawking radiation? Can this be achieved in a particle accelerator?
Considering these are quantum issues, what are the odds?
"Creating a microscopic black hole is tricky, since one needs a reasonable amount of neutronium, but may possibly be achievable by jamming large numbers of atomic nuclei together until they stick. This is left as an exercise to the reader."
My God! It's every physics textbook I've ever read!
Any one else read this as "Lab-Made Firewall may be a black hole" ?
Considering the reliability of my ISP in the last few weeks, I simply figured that's what they were experimenting with...
Dammit - I was just about to Google for the title. And my mod points ran out yesterday.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Feasibility rating: 2/10. Highly, highly unlikely. But not impossible.
I really hope that this is just a joke, as there are so many things wrong with this plan, that it makes my head hurt. The feasability is about 0/10. Black holes don't have infinite gravity. The mass of a hole is the same as the mass before it collapsed. So, if you collapse a baseball into a black hole, you have a black hole that weighs the same as a baseball. THE PROBLEM is that it would create an event horizon so small that it would probably pass between all the particles between the surface and the center of the earth. (atoms are mostly empty space, when not being compressed by the immense gravity of say, a neutron star.) Once you have created it, it still only has the gravitational potential of a baseball. Not very menacing.
So, you make a bigger black hole. The energy or mass you need to create a noticable black hole is probably going to be enough, that it could be better used to simply vaporize the earth.
Nice try, though.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Everyone knows it would be irresponsible to leave your black hole running when you leave the lab. Last person out shuts off the lights and the black holes.
"World-wide catastrophe, *phfff*, don't be ridicu
Table-ized A.I.
WRONG...
It will NOt happily orbit the sun. It has a far larger mass than the earth does so therefore it will have a larger attraction ot the sun's gravity well (pulling the SUN towards it!)
the asteroids, moon, mars, venus will all disappear first in a nice slurping sound. (didnt know that did you? black holes make a loud slurping sound!)
more than likely the moons around juipeter and saturn will be slingshot into interstellar space at insane velocities while the gas giants get a high speed diet applied to their butts in a long drawn out slurp...
If one did make it, there would then be 73 virgins waiting.
A note on the optimistic side of things...
Couldn't this be used to get rid of certain pollutants? If you have too much carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide, send it into the black hole! What would happen to nuclear wastes (please experiment carefully before proceeding with this whole-heartedly) if you "throw them in the hopper"?
Maybe you want a better, and possibly more humane way of getting rid of death row inmates? Throw them in, and poof!!!
The uses could be endless! But, like anything else, put in the wrong hands, the original subject applies. :(
But at least then, the rest of the universe can be happy to know that the contant drone of static will someday cease bombarding them from the radio waves and such that we have been sending out since early in the 20th Century!
I have a bumber sticker in my cubicle that says
No, you just defined Hell: the 72 virgins ARE Slashdotters - all male.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
ON the subject of the SciFi channel, does it bother anyone else that they are finally getting a decent set of shows (at least on Friday) with SG1,Atlantis, and BSG, that can garner them some credibility in the TV world but then they go and produce crap like "Mansquito". Mansquito...I think the title says all that needs to be said about this movie and about the quality of management at SciFi.
Mansquito.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
And, of course, scientists are well aware of the risk
Apparently RHIC's scientists are not. John Marburger, Brookhaven's director, specifically said:
"There is simply not enough matter or energy in the RHIC collisions to create a black hole. This conclusion does not require difficult or obscure calculations and has not been questioned by any physicist in a relevant field who has considered the matter."
That's pretty blunt, clearly stating that anyone who believed such an option was possible was a kook or fraud and not possessing a credible scientific background (one should always regard such approaches as a good indication that there is something to be concerned about). Now that the shoe is on the other foot, it would appear that Brookhaven's program should be immediately suspended and its managers and scientists put before Congressional inquiry.
Read Marburger's earlier statement in full here: Statement on ABCNEWS Website Article on RHIC
Dude... you should read Singularity by Bill DeSmedt...
This sounds like another experiment on how the universe was created aka 'The big bang theory'.
now we have somewhere to put the lawyers...
I doubt that many slashdotters will make it to heaven.
It's only heaven for the receiver, not the 72 slashdotters!
Hmmmm...wonder if they could be convinced to move their labs closer to Redmond.....
-- kortex "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts"
Like slashdotters would know what to do with 72 virgins.
Um, how do you turn it off?
No sig.
Yeah, ok ok. So we might destroy the earth or pop a void in the universe or something. Even so, the Register article about this discovery says that the fire ball burned 300x hotter than the surface of the sun...that's surely an abundant source of energy if it could be controlled...yet, doesn't this sound a little bit like that contraption Doc-Oc created in Spider-Man 2? When is April's Fools anyway?
What about the potential for worm holes and space travel? Wasn't there some posting a while back about surviving the end of the world by sending some spermies and eggs in a nanobot through a black hole in order to populate humans on the other end (whether that be another dimension or another corner of the universe)? Haha!
According to this article, the possibility of black hole creation is nonexistent:
The lab faces an odd safety question: Will collisions create black holes, starting a chain reaction that eats up Earth?
Each blast is too tiny to make a black hole, Ozaki (RHIC's director) says. Nevertheless, the lab has convened a panel to address the doomsday scenarios.
Somehow I always feel comforted when there's a blue ribbon panel that is convened to address such things. They're always good for a catchy slogan or two, like:
"Don't Panic!!!"
"Duck and Cover"
"At least you won't have to file taxes this year!"
Think they've convened yet?
If you need more minions and you offer health insurance, I know a few unemployed geeks who would like to make your acquaintance.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Just like Miroku's! Gotta work on the containment bracelet 'tho
You just wasted a lot more than a sig's worth of bandwidth.
I really hope that this is just a joke
The bit about the evil minions didn't tip you off?
-mkb
Shouldn't the smallest possible particle have infinite density and therefore be a black hole?
It would have a mass equal to that of the Earth, which it adsorbed, plus whatever miniscule mass it had in the first place. The OP was correct.
Oh wait.
Offtopic, I know, but this has always confused me.
First, why 72? Why not 73 or 75? Is there some significance to the number 72?
Second, how are 72 virgins supposed to last you for eternity? I mean.... this is -=forever=- we're talking about. How do you ration that? Even if you only bang one virgin every 100,000,000 years you're still going to run out eventualy. I mean, they're only virgins once right?
I should probably think less.....
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
This explains why koopa shells disappear when you kick them off the right side of the screen in Super Mario Bros..
What if the terrorists get it? Or the Tourists? This could become a Weapon of Mass Suction! Better keep this out of the hands of furriners!
Prof. X: So, have you finished writing your thesis yet?
Graduate student: Uh... no.
Prof. X: And how is that?
Graduate student: Um...a black hole ate my data?
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
just wanted to say duh, since alot of the posts are duh......
The singularity wouldn't orbit the Sun very long either. A singularity composed of only one Earth-mass would evaporate due to Hawking radiation very quickly.
Also David Brin's "Earth", if I remember the plot correctly. Actually a pretty close correspondence...
Well, this will be my final post. I'm creating a nuclear powered egg to send my child off in, then I'll retire to the South Pacific to wait for the black hole to swallow us all. I tried to warn them- I TRIED! But I can't leave now and cause a panic.
I can only hope that my son ends up on a planet where the solar radiation allows him to fly around, fighting bad guys and getting hot chicks.
SMMMMMMMOKIN'!!!!!!!
Cliff Claven
K.E.G. Party Chairman
Founding Leader of: Koncerned for Egalitarin Governance
Your objections sound reasonable, but you left out one crucial piece of information:
Just how massive would it need to be?
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
That's 72 Crystal clear raisins.
because 5 * 72 = 362 (nearly a year allow 3 or 4 special uncounted holidays).
You did know that Allah was one of the Sun Gods didn't you?
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Hold on to your hats. Creation of the next universe is getting near...
Everyone knows you just need duct tape.
The particle accelerator has 2 miles of maintenance corridors, 3 miles of wires, a 4 terabyte of data storage, and is held together with 11 miles of duct tape.
A 'Super String' was discovered yesterday in a quantum-super-electron microscope. It appeared to be a flat ribbon-like material that was sticky on one side and silvery on the other.
Is that book about the goatse guy?
Actually, with a sufficiently large micro-black hole it would work quite well. Unless, that is, the center of the earth is solid rather than liquid. If it is, indeed, solid, then the hole might mot be large enough to create a void that particles would collapse into...
OTOH, even if it's normally solid, the Hawking radiation would probably raise the temperature sufficiently to melt it. So then the hole would start growing again.
The problem is getting the "sufficiently large micro-black hole". It would obviously need to start out with a capture cross-section significantly larger than a proton, but how large isn't obvious.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Worse than that. They've been virgins so long, and are so desperate that they'll gladly just do whatever hole that happens to come along. They're also equipped well enough to make any resistance from the hapless islamist terrorist resistance. ...puts a different spin on: "resistance is futile, you will service us".
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Quite the opposite! In fact, not even that! You're fired!
qntm.org
*
Get your Unix fortune now!
I so succeeded it, didn't i? ^_^
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
should've guessed that it was not god, but some dudes in a lab that are responsible for the tsunami...
Geez, hundreds of comments on an article about creating an artificial singularity, and so far not a single discussion of Romulan engine technology. It just doesn't make sense.
There must be a new mmorpg/comic book/faster cpu/sci-fi movie/Taco Bell menu item out today that's distracting the true card-carrying geeks away from their beloved Slashdot.
"There is a thin line between ignorance and arrogance, and only I have managed to erase that line." - Dr. Science
Microsoft created a lab-created black hole called, "Windows."
Because they believe that the defiled virgins would have their virginity miraculously restored after the fact. I shit you not; they do believe this. It is, after all, in Paradise, where all things are possible.
"Ayn Rand is a bloody socialist compared to me." - Robert A. Heinlein
Didn't they use a synthentic singularity to power their ships on STNG?
You need, apparently, to compress something roughly the size of Mount Everest to get a black hole big enough. I don't know how much energy it'd take to turn that into a black hole of the same mass, but it can't be much more than the 10^26 or so Joules needed to deconstruct the Earth manually, can it?
For the record, and I suppose you might already have figured this out but I'm saying it just in case, the feasibility ratings aren't strictly speaking probabilities. 2/10 doesn't imply a 20% chance of it working. They're more like putting all the methods in order on a line from zero to ten, then spacing them out a bit.
qntm.org
Once you have created it, it still only has the gravitational potential of a baseball. Not very menacing.
I'm curious: would you be willing to touch the thing? What would happen if you touch it with the tip of your finger?
You are more than the sum of what you consume. Desire is not an occupation.
Where did you get the 10^26 joules figure for deconstructing the Earth manually? The gravitational binding energy of the Earth is 3/5 GM^2/R, which comes out to about 4 x 10^32 joules if I did the math correctly.
the 72 virgins wating for them are other slashdotters.
Well, after you take a bit off, the rest comes off more easily.
(OTOH, I certainly didn't do any math for that. My congrats to you for even a rough maximum.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
You are correct. I modified the page accordingly. Thanks for your comments.
qntm.org
Wouldn't this make a really cool weapon for FPS games. I mean you just shoot it at an object or person(s) and it/they simply get sucked into the black hole in a wild manner (Think outside-in).
Hmm, could you levitate a black hole against the force of gravity and feed it matter at a rate equal to its evaporation rate, then use the radiated energy as a heat source?
Would such a construct be a useful direct mass to energy conversion device? Or would it just irradiate all the mass in the vicinity, producing lots of radioactive crap to get rid of?
I used KE = (1/2)mv^2 where m is the Earth's mass and v is escape velocity of 11km/s. Out of curiosity, may I ask you where you got your gravitational binding energy formula from?
qntm.org
This is the first step to building the Romulan Warbird I've always wanted!!!
You could levitate it electrostatically if you charged it, but it would be a lot safer to put it in orbit and beam power down, or something.
It would be impractical to feed it at a rate sufficient to keep it from evaporating, however. But if you could, it would indeed be a useful direct mass-energy converter. It would irradiate things, but with that kind of potential energy output, I'd live with it... again, put it in orbit.
Ack, I hate replying to myself... yes, I know escape velocity will decrease as more mass is removed, this is a first (over)estimate.
qntm.org
Your formula applies to launching a point mass with the mass of the Earth away from another planet the size of the Earth. Mine applies to dispersing all of the matter within the Earth to infinity, which I think is the correct thing to do.
a derivation of the gravitational binding energy formula. (Too lazy to type it in myself.)
erm, 360
qntm.org
eh?
They have to use gold atoms, don't they? I bet CERN uses something much cheaper, like iron atoms.
Americans just have to show off their bling bling.
IANAP, but I believe it would pass right through your finger without you even noticing. Remember, as the GP stated, even if you compressed a baseball down to a singularity, it would still only have the mass of a baseball, and its gravity would only pull on other matter as hard as said baseball would.
There are no tiger attacks in my area and it's all because this rock I'm holding keeps the tigers away.
No most smart people know that the feeling of two opposite pole magnets coming together would be the feeling of what a blackhole is doing... a sucking would be appropriate ESPECIALLY if ATMOSPHERE was being pulled toward the center of the object...
And you wouldn't get more energy out of the black hole than the amount of energy you expended in creating it and the mass you fed into it. Why? SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS!
If fate makes you a motorcycle, you become a motorcycle.
Dump toxic waste into it?
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
So? Just getting energy out equal to the mass fed in is plenty -- total mass-energy conversion.
Holy cow, they've invented synthetic management. How long and the whole glory will be automatic?
Oh look, the karma is running away. Bye karma, bye bye karma.
;)
I think that deserves a -1 unsportsmanlike conduct
Or not. The black hole would have a mass of whatever it started with plus the mass oh the earth., it would NOT have a "far larger mass than the earth does".
There are no tiger attacks in my area and it's all because this rock I'm holding keeps the tigers away.
That would be assuming that Hawking Radiation will directly power our homes, automobiles, and blenders. You might totally convert the mass to Hawking Radiation, but unless all of our devices just suck up hawking radiation out of their surroundings, it is going to become dependent on the efficincy of whatever process you use to convert that radiation into electricity.
If fate makes you a motorcycle, you become a motorcycle.
Honestly, I must say that your attitude is harshing my mellow. You're a real buzz-killer. With comments like that I bet you don't get invited to many parties.
Ok, so now the question is, how much mass does a black hole need to be able to swallow the earth, and where are we going to get that kind of mass? I wonder if we can do this with some kind of distributed computing project.
And boy was that black girl pissed off!
Again, so? Even nuclear reactors depend on mundane electrical-generation processes as heating water or other fluids. That doesn't mean that nuclear reactors aren't very efficient energy sources. Total mass-energy conversion would be even more efficient, even though it's not PERFECT and there are losses along the way.
Isn't this the power source for a TARDIS?
with all of its virgins as well.
on the other hand, our civilization is just a mold as far as the universe is concerned. so - in a big cosmic sense - who cares.
Who wants virgins? Gimme 72 experienced perverts! Now that would almost be worth dying for :)
Hey, there's a simpler and more feasible way to destroy the earth, ... just try to find the mass of the Higgs-Boson particle.
Oh, man. I thought Saddam Hussein was bad. He only had fictional WMD's. (Weapons of Mass Destruction)
I demand that we IMMEDIATELY execute a preemptive strike on these scientists and their WMG's. (Weapons of Mass Gravitation!)
There could be citizens in that black hole, and it is no less than our duty to go in there and liberationalize them!
"This is an "A" and "B" conversation. SHUT THE HELL UP!!"
He is not a sun god.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Somebody get John Crighton and Aeryn Sun on the horn. Too bad Dargo got killed, maybe they can get Scorpius to help.
I doubt that many slashdotters will make it to heaven.
And even if we did we probably wouldn't make it very far with the virgins anyway...
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
...how an extremely tiny nuclei fireball could possibly possess enough gravitational force to act like, and be considered, a 'black hole'? I minored in physics, and follow scientific discoveries and the research as best I can, but I just can't figure out this mini-black-hole bit. I'd always heard that you'd need the mass of several Sol-size suns to establish a gravity field strong enough to create a black hole, due to the repulsive nature of energetic particles. Gravity is a profoundly weak force compared to the other three forces, correct?
(And for that matter, the fact that quantum theory researchers talk about graviton particles, and seem to be trying to unify gravity with the other forces, really mystifies me. Didn't Einstein already demonstrate that gravity is a curvature in space-time???)
But hey, whatever they are creating in the lab, it is comforting to know that Hawking radiation exists! Because black holes kinda suck.
if i had mod points, you'd get 'em. very clever.. :) of course, i'm married...
Those who can, do. Those who can't, go into business for themselves.
Freeman Dyson is the better choice....
then, we get a dept. of planetary security, and performing mathematical calculations is considered a threat to global security. mathemiticians, physicists, and the occasional engineer are rounded up, and shipped to the moon, for detainment.
I WANT MY BLACK HOLE IN A BOX
When I learned that a black hole was created in a lab, I thought someone had cloned Britney!
Just to give equal time to religious fanatics on both sides I imagine you should be more worried about fundementalist Christians laying there hands on the technology, especialy those in sects with a strong penchant for dwelling on the Book of Revelation and the Rapture.
You see they are already sitting around waiting not so patiently for the end of the world and are convinced that God will sweep all the good Christians, them, up to heaven when the end is near and all the heathens will be left to burn in the hell or the black hole, which ever one has the strongest pull.
@de_machina
Just what they needed to create the quantum computer: A mini black hole as /dev/null
"However, even if the ball of plasma is a black hole, it is not thought to pose a threat. At these energies and distances, gravity is not the dominant force in a black hole" reads in the press release from the research group.
(The research team members were not available for interview.)
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
From TFA:
However, even if the ball of plasma is a black hole, it is not thought to pose a threat. At these energies and distances, gravity is not the dominant force in a black hole.
Hmm.. Nice they're so sure its not a threat!!
*--BigMan--- Time flies like an arrow.. but personally I prefer a nice glass of wine!
According to Newtons law of gravitation which would apply approximately here the acceleration of a body in a gravitational field IS INDEPENDENT of the mass of the body. Remember Galileo's famous Pisa experiment!! Momentum is not conserved when a force acts (also a Newton Law). Ergo as the body picks up mass its acceleration would be unchanged and hence so would its velocity. Of course this assumes the mass of the Earth didn't change much which might lose validity as it was consumed by the hole. Possibly more interesting would be how the wierdo frictional effects between the Earth and blackhole would vary as it's mass grew at the expense of the Earth.
Actually this sounds like a very difficult Physics Phd project of no use to anyone!
Given the tiny cross-section of even quite massive black holes and high radiation rates when they're small, this is a moderately large - and extremely massive - object.
Extremely massive? Yes. Moderately large? No. IANAAP, but there's a Niven short story book which claims that a neutron star with the density of Sol would be roughly the size of a baseball. Black holes are far denser than neutron stars, being massive enough to collapse neutron repulsion.
Elsewhere in this thread it was suggested that the size needed to balance matter uptake with the amount of mass lost through Hawking radiation is in the neighborhood of Mount Everest for size, which is rather smaller than our sun; I would not blindly repeat another poster's unfounded claim except that I also seem to remember such a claim and also cannot verify its validity. Running with the presumption that the amount of mass needed is less than that of the Earth, however, is quite a bit more reasonable - I am certain that Hawking bleed is a moderately slow thing on planetary scales, and believe that a black hole on par with a planet for mass will not evaporate before its job is done.
Even given an Earth-massed black hole, if a neutron star the mass of Sol is only a baseball in size, the black hole's superior density and Earth's inferior mass spell one very, very small black hole. Just the mass difference alone would mean that an Earth-massed neutron star would be hard to see without tools; what change the superior density of the black hole would cause should be dramatic, though I don't know the actual numbers in question.
I remember reading a speculative article by an amateur in a zine on a BBS back before zines were lame which suggested a set of math for exactly this. I have no idea how clueful said amateur was, and it's been almost two decades, so I'll be damned if I can remember so many details. One thing, however, struck me enough that I remember it to this day: his claim, which I cannot defend, was that a black hole which could eventually eat an Earth-sized planet would be smaller than a speck of dust by a major difference, and that one of the practical difficulties of dealing with said black hole (the ongoing discussion was in fact around the short story Hole Man and how one might respond to the situation without evacuating Earth) would be just aiming. There had been a bunch of suggestions regarding thermonuclear devices, lasers and other things trying to excite the contained matter enough to warp the gravity distribution and attempt to cause fragmentation or accelerate Hawking loss, but it seems that even if you have a nuke that'll survive long enough to make it close to a black hole without going off or being destroyed, and even if you surmount the time issues approaching the Schwartzschild radius, that it's gonna be damned hard just to decide where the place you want to aim is going to be.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
I'm thinking that if you were to take the mass of Mount Everest (1 'EM') and plug it into the equations that give you the schwartzchild radius for an object (URL:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzschild_ra dius), I think that you could say that the energy needed to create an 'artificial' black hole will be at least equal to the additional mass needed to cause an object to collapse upon itself, since e=mc^2. I say at least, as your method of 'compression' will probably not be as efficient as gravity, and quite possibly many orders of magnitude less efficient.
Keeping the math simple (hahahahahha...I just SLAY myself....), we can clearly say that Mt. Everest is nowhere close enought to having enough mass to collapse. We could also safely say that another Mt. Everest compressed into the first will still be way off from the total mass needed to collapse, right? However, using the big 'E' man's classic, e=mc^2, we can safely say that a few billion tons of mass * the speed of light is a hell of a lot of energy. Now granted, uranium and plutionium are several times denser than rock, but considering that most nuclear devices can produce megaton yeilds from a scant few pounds of enriched fissile material, I think you can imagine how much energy a few billion tons of mass might be. So, I think it would be safe to say, just using some guesswork that it would take far less energy to simply obliterate the earth, than it would be to engage in black hole silliness. But, I give you points for romantic creativity.
BTW, while we are talking about it, your page misses a very obvious, plausable, and frighteningly simple method. I'd give this 10/10:
Modern nuclear weapons are fusion weapons. You fire off a fission weapon to generate the heat/pressure needed to start a fusion reaction. Once fusion is burning, you can dump as much hydrogen isotope into the reaction as you can lay your hands on. Duterium isn't that hard to get, and if you look at the weapon designs from the 1950's, either the Sovie Union or the US probably had the technology needed to construct a doomsday weapon capable of cracking the earth's mantle. Just light off a trillion-megaton yeild device, and that should pretty much take care of the earth. Want fragments rather than large chunks? Add more hydrogen. The only risk of failure is miscalculating the energy needed, and only destroying all life on the planet, rather than fragmenting it. And, just think, this is old technology that at least two countries have mastered. Sleep tight...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I really hope that this is just a joke
No, it's the first article in the new globicide category.
Jesus. Don't even bother modding parent into the ground. Break out the metamoderation sticks.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
> At these energies and distances, gravity is not
> the dominant force in a black hole.
Where do they _find_ these people?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
(Hence, if the sun randomly imploded to a black hole, nothing would get sucked in - it'd just be a helluva lot colder and darker)
Incidentally, 10 million, billion, billionths of a second sounds to me like 10 million seconds...
im in ur
Now, the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), that's a different story. Here the energy density and black hole production cross sections are actually high enough, a black hole production signal could actually be measured.
Sadly, in all cases, the black holes evaporate harmlessly.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
Somebody reads too much sience finction. The complete story is here:
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/cosm.htm
next time, leave the sniping commentary to someone else :)
I have found the best part of black hole study in The Nature of Space and Time lecture.
"We can see the big bang in full frontal nakedness."
Stephen Hawking.
But if you want to bring up the energy costs of running the system, well. . . I should think that is where the bulk of the problem lies! Remember that in order for this nanoscopic black hole to come into existence, you need to expend an enourmous amount of energy to create and maintain the black hole, and to accelerate particles into it. Remember, the black hole's gravity is negligible at this size, it won't be sucking the particles in all by itself.
And the mass you are totally converting to energy is a bunch of subatomic particles! They have very little mass to begin with. I am no quantum physicist, but I'd bet real money that if you did the math on this problem your energy output would be less than your energy input.
If fate makes you a motorcycle, you become a motorcycle.
If one did make it, there would then be 73 virgins waiting.
well... while 73 is a very cool prime number, i personaly find 72=2*2*2*3*3 more interesting one, becouse it can factorized in so many different ways (ex: 9*8, 6*12 2*6*6 and so on) - it can be considered as an advantege. For example you can assign your all 72 virgins into equal groups to do something - the task imposibble with prime number 73. Such a possibility can have an adventage over just having 1.3888% more virgins.
Alternatively one can argue that you can take one virgin apart to play with her in any way you want and at the sami time assign the remaining 72 virgins into some equal groups, but it puts you in the situation of choosing one over all others which brakes this beautyfull symetry of number 72.
The question "what is better: 72 virgins in the heaven or 73 virgins in the heaven" seems to be a very thoungh one.
..and dogs with bees in their mouth, so when they bark, the bees shoot out of their mouth!
No, you just defined Hell: the 72 virgins ARE Slashdotters - all male.
oh... hmmm... i though the therm "being slashdoted" meant something less disgusting... f**k... hmmm...
YOU ULGY DISGUSTING DIRTY SLASHDOTERS!
I'm just going to train my easterbunny to run at the speed of light. As it nears the speed of light, his mass will rise to infinity, thus sucking in the universe.
Much more cunning, I'd say.
Reminds me of the old "Bomb Squad" T-Shirts...
"I am an astrophysicist.. If you see me departing the planet at a high velocity, KEEP UP!"
Hmm.. maybe I should be talking to Think Geek about this.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I call it a hawking hole.
Because I have low karma, I need pills.
Another great site for Doomsday scenarios is Exit Mundi.
They also address this particular genre of doom: http://www.exitmundi.nl/vacuum.htm
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
Those damned physicists are going to collapse Earth into an ultra-dense particle about the size of a pea!
All aboard the Noah! Ladies, please submit panties for histocompatibility screening!
He wasn't a Sun god. He has been for centuries.
I suppose that it was first said of the Moon god "God it is to show the way", since most travel on the desert is at night. And certainly it would be the Moon god who was merciful (as compared to the fearful heat of the day).
There are lots of other remanents. But he hasn't been a Moon god in a very long time.
Still, there's about 13 lunar months in a year, so:
72 * 5 = 360 (thanks for the correction)
360 / 13 = 27.69 (this time I used a calculator)
That's pretty close to the 27.5 days in a lunar month, so you're right, it's a solar-lunar reference, not just a solar reference.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
there would be 72 virgins waiting for them in heaven, just like there were for the 9/11 hijackers
What Koran didn't mention is that those 72 virgins are all male.
Not true. Read up on "Hawking radiation". Hawking theorized that virtual particle pairs created by tidal forces (which normally recombine for zero net result) would sometimes be split by one falling into the event horizon and the other proceeding into the outside universe. Since tidal forces become exponentially stronger the smaller a black hole is, so does the Hawking radiation. Since mass is conserved in this process, to an outside observer it appears as though the black hole is radiating energy and shrinking. Very small black holes shrink much faster than they can pull in Earth-density mass (small event horizon and total gravity), so such a black hole would simply explode rather than growing. This explosion is expected to be quite large by our standards, by the way.
(Hence, if the sun randomly imploded to a black hole, nothing would get sucked in - it'd just be a helluva lot colder and darker)
True, except the potential energy of the Sun's mass in it's current configuration would likely cause a highly energetic event as the mass was sucked into a black hole with a few kilometer event horizon. BTW, I assume you know that a star smaller than 1.4 solar masses can't naturally form a black hole.
Incidentally, 10 million, billion, billionths of a second sounds to me like 10 million seconds...
Much simpler to write it as 1.0e-24 secs.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Stop being so paranoid. Hey, what is that pulling on my l
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
...or put it in a Romulan engine core...
There is going to be a civil war this year. Certain factions in the Federal government are going to put on another 9/11. This time not everyone is going to fall in line. In fact, a bold majority will disbelieve the claims about others being behind it and instead focus on the real perpetrators. As an explicit police state rule is put into effect a bold majority will resist the corruption of the state. The "insurrection," if you will, will be fighting against the master shadow puppet government. Resist, be killed. Adhere, give up everything that has been.
The states' national guard units have been depleted for a reason.
So, you have a choice: Are you going to fight, risking life. Or, are you going to give up everything for the promised safety of a corrupted false state.
Those damned physicists are going to collapse Earth into an ultra-dense particle about the size of a pea!
It will be the size of a marble.
Tag lost or not installed.
I didn;t even know they were Catholic.
72 Virgins... bah... I'll bet you anything after you've gone through 5 of them you'll be begging for a pro.
And yes, I stole that joke from right wing stooge Dennis Miller... so sue me.
-- This sig for rent.
...how much the arXiv kicks ass! There's never before been such a vast, high-quality, centralised repository of scientific research in the history of the human race. Never before have amateurs been able to access the most cutting-edge science our civilisation has produced - quickly, easily, and for free.
Thanks to all those who have made it possible.
Actually I was thinking South Park, Volcano.
"That's right Jane, duck and cover!"
Damn those eggheads...
:)
First they're sending spam out into the galaxy and now they've "possibly" created a black hole on Earth.
Don't they ever watch horror films ? or can they not see the inevitable ending ?
Oh well, time to go back to my home world then
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
just highly improbable : )
Extremely massive? Yes. Moderately large? No. IANAAP, but there's a Niven short story book which claims that a neutron star with the density of Sol would be roughly the size of a baseball.
I'm sorry I was confusing. By "moderately large" I mean "in comparison to a subatomic particle or an atomic nucleus". That's still quite a few orders of magnitude down from a marble or basketball. (When a nuclear engineer talks about the cross-section of the broad side of a barn he's talking about a MUCH smaller barn than a farmer would be. B-) )
Even at earth-core pressures your black hole isn't going to be eating much matter - let alone enough to keep ahead of hawking radiation - unless its event horzon is getting up to a size comparable to molecules, rather than subhadronic particles. That requires a LOT more mass than the ions they're smashing together in the news item.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
You can levitate a charged black hole.
But Hawking radiation is going to radiate a zoo of particles and I am not sure how useful that would be.
Classically you can lower a mass from a wench and extract all of the mass to energy as it approaches the horizon, but the rope required would be rather unrealistic.
could you levitate a black hole against the force of gravity and feed it matter
Do both at once - feed the matter in fast enough, from underneath. You're now playing the world's most dangerous game of keepy-uppy.
Wonder if this would generate enough power to make the Alcubierre warp drive feasible?
freedom, n. Allowing people you don't like to do things you disapprove of.
On the brighter side, we may have just discovered the solution to the Fermi paradox...
David Brin IS great and writes you back when you e-mail him. We had a great little chat about how Lucas stopped story telling and started using object oriented programing to make his "movies."
The Uplift universe is my 3rd favorite sci-fi/fantasy world after Middle Earth and Iain M. Banks the Culture series.
I think we do need to start uplift btw.
You just need to have my car and my girlfriend and your wallet will become the black hole which you seek to create.
They're Pinky... They're Pinky and the Brain, Brain, Brain...Brrrain.
Does this mean we're all going to die?
Insert Pithy Quote here.
Perhaps I'm in left field, or rather not even in the ball park, but gravity is the least strong of the four forces classified according to Hawking [gravity, electromagnetic, weak nuclear, and strong nuclear]. He asserts that, because electromagnetic forces usually offset [positive and negative charges], and because large bodies usually have a large amount, they generally cancel each other out. In this case, they might not cancel. Also, only in large bodies do gravitational forces predominate. In speaking of the so-called grand unified theory, he seems to suggest that higher energies produce stronger electromagnetic forces. [Brief History of Time (1998), p. 76] However, the disclaimer is that a particle accelerator large enough to test these theories isn't likely to exist anytime soon. Perhaps these folks have found a new way to develop some tests? My disclaimer, IANAQP.
Read Earth by David Brin. Its a book about what happens when some people try to do just that, and the hole gets out of control and falls to the center of the earth.
a neutron star with the density of Sol would be roughly the size of a baseball
A neutron star with the density of Sol would not be a neutron star.
All it takes is nukes and nerves.
So - If you have a hawking black hole of sufficiently small size, it can effectively convert matter to energy at a predetermined rate for no cost, based on the size of the black hole.
To keep it stable, you need to add matter at the same rate that it's radiating Hawking radiation. Rather counterintuitively, to lower the energy output, you feed it more matter, to raise it you choke the matter back a bit, let the black hole shrink a bit, and then feed it matter sufficient to stabilize it at the new enrgy output. And of course, if you run out of matter entirely it'll create a runaway reaction as the the black hole evaporates entirely.
Doesn't this in some way violate thermodynamics? You're turning useless energy removed from the system via entropy into useful energy you can work with again. Given the correctly chosen size for a black hole at the core, you can pick one that produces energy at the same rate as the core feeds it, it heats the core, and you make sure to convert that energy to matter sufficiently to keep it fed.
What obvious physical limitation am I missing?
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
It consoles me to note that these women are virgins for precisely the reason why middle eastern men started the tradition of making the women cover their faces: they're so fucking ugly you can't imagine looking at them.
Islam: verb, noun.
- verb contraction, "I slam", as in "I slam airplanes into buildings";
- noun, an adherent of the principles therein, generally employed as a taxi driver or convenience store clerk.
Black holes only influence things by their gravity...
There is no gravity. The Earth sucks.
"BTW, I assume you know that a star smaller than 1.4 solar masses can't naturally form a black hole."
Well, I didn't know the exact figure, but yes - I knew our sun would not do so.
"Much simpler to write it as 1.0e-24 secs."
Indeed. Damn those non-mathematicians.
im in ur
Cool. I was a little disappointed when the first RHIC power-up didn't result in the entire universe being turned into strange matter. At least I didn't notice any change.
Liberty in your lifetime
No, the mass of the black hole is simply being converted to energy ala e=mc^2.
You're turning useless energy removed from the system via entropy into useful energy you can work with again.
The net entropy is constant, and one thing that Hawking verified is that no information about what went into the black hole is being returned to the outside universe.
Given the correctly chosen size for a black hole at the core, you can pick one that produces energy at the same rate as the core feeds it, it heats the core, and you make sure to convert that energy to matter sufficiently to keep it fed.
Yes, though this would be a quite tricky process. Black holes in this size range would be very small, so they can't suck in matter at that high a rate. Further, since things go exponentially faster and more energetically as the object evaporates, it would be a dicey situation. I don't think I'd want to be near such a reactor. ;-)
IIRC, the final explosion is "the equivalent of a million H-bombs or, depending on a not well known constant, a million times bigger than that.". Nice planet-destroyer weapon for the science fiction buffs. :-)
By the way, the existence of small black holes is quite uncertain, since the only way they could have formed is during the Big Bang. Eventually (many, many times the amount of time the universe will have shining stars) even large black holes should evaporate to these small sizes, but it's unlikely any observers will be around (depending on your religious views, of course;).
What obvious physical limitation am I missing?
None. Read "A Brief History of Time" it covers the topic well. In a nutshell, after a *very* long time, Hawking theorizes the open, ever-expanding universe reaches a state of heat death with no matter anywhere and the same temperature everywhere.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Well now there's a goddamn black hole where I used to drink beer!
My graduate studies were in nuclear physics, and I spent several summers back during the 80's at Long Island's Brookhaven National Laboratory. Back then, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider didn't exist yet. All there was at the site were some enormous empty tunnels, dug for a different accelerator project that never got off the ground. The tunnels stood as a monument to fiscal and bureaucratic incompetence and government boondoggles... but they looked really cool and spooky at night.
In short, it was the big make-out spot in those days. Or a place for drinking beer, if you were a physics geek with no girlfriend. I have many fond memories of hanging out by those huge empty holes on a summer night with my friends, watching the deer watching us, curiously from the tree line, and getting quietly drunk.
"Extremism in defense of liberty is more fun."
Actually, even at a million kilometers away (or approximately 1 solar radius) from the sun's center, the sun's gravity is still approximately 28 g's. I'd call that really strong.
Just my $0.02. :)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Common misconception. Hawking demonstrated that with great pressure (such as are found during the big bang and in the aftermath of large stellar collisions) objects which would not otherwise collapse would then collapse. These are called "quantuum black holes" and "quantuum neutron stars," and though there is a point at which they'll bleed away due to hawking radiation, there are also stable sizes which are smaller than would otherwise collapse. A neutron star the size of Sol would be stable, provided a moderate food source.
There are people which believe that the Tuskunga meteor strike was actually a black hole, and there are simulations of the gravity effect which are reasonably close to what actually happened, with the flattening and the safe part and the curious burn marks and the OY LEVEN, GOOD GUYVEN IT'S ON MY SHOE.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
...someone loses an eye!
I am not a number - I am a free man!
You need massive amounts of matter/energy piled together to produce a natural black hole, one that collapses under it's own weight and becomes a singularity. You can however "force" matter to become so close that the local density is big enough to become singular. Smashing them together at incredible speeds seems to be a way to accomplish this.
Compare this with a hydrogen bomb: You need a lot of hydrogen on a pile to achieve fusion (the weight of our sun seems to do) but if you put a few grams inside the core of an atomic bomb you get some sort of forced fusion, although not stable and very short.
int main(void) {while(1) fork(); return 0;}
See this explanation to your first question.
As to gravitons, Einstein showed that classically, gravity can be described by the curvature of spacetime. However, gravity must be quantum in nature, like all the other interactions. That may mean that it's described by graviton particles, or quantum geometry, or strings, or something else. Regardless, even if it's described by some quantum version of spacetime curvature, it will have to behave at least approximately like graviton particles propagating around, even if that isn't the exact fundamental description.
Rubyflame is correct. A neutron star is always much denser than a regular star, because (by definition) its matter is compressed to nuclear densities. (If you meant a neutron star with the mass of the Sun, that would be on the order of 10 kilometers in size.) Your response about quantum black holes is a non-sequitur; it has nothing to do with the fact that neutron stars are very dense.
Earth was also destroyed by a mini black hole in Dan Simmon's "Hyperion" series.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
4.3x10^-2 picoCartmans So that means they have the face of Cartman, the width of Calista Flockhart and the vocal cords of Kenny?
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
She (her head, at least) was forever immortalized long ago. This time they just cloned Rikishi.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
If French Fries= Freedom Fries and French Toast = Freedom Toast I want to leave the US and go live in Freedom
How's that working out for you? Any closer to realizing this utopian goal of European fantasticality? Or is reality still biting your ass?
I bet you can't go now because it's just not convenient... I understand. Having the courage of your convictions is extremely Bushlike.
And I find this sequence of events likely
You sir are a twit :) The point is that the poster meant to say mass of sol but he said density of sol. The followup was simply pointing out his error.
beautiful riposte. Truly you are channeling Twain.