Lab Created Black Hole?

Blarrrg writes "Humans may have created the first ever black hole in a lab. From the article: 'When the gold nuclei smash into each other they are broken down into particles called quarks and gluons. These form a ball of plasma about 300 times hotter than the surface of the Sun. This fireball, which lasts just 10 million, billion, billionths of a second, can be detected because it absorbs jets of particles produced by the beam collisions.'"

Comments

Oblig. Futurama quote:

[TripMaster Monkey]

"I call it a 'Hawking hole'."

- Stephen Hawking

Premature evaporation?

[Anonymous Coward]

10 million, billion, billionths of a second? That sucks!

Good god!

[yobjob]

This isn't the sort of experiment that I want to see go out of control...

If it goes wrong

[shenanigans]

A friend of mine (a nuclear physicist) worked on a similar project at CERN (IIRC). At the time there were some (mostly unfounded) worries that the produced black holes would be a danger to man kind (they're not, as the article says they evaporate so quickly you hardly get to detect them.) Anyway, he said that if everything goes to hell, he planned to enter the afterlife wearing a t-shirt saying "I DID IT!" :-)

real world application

[Tachikoma]

so in a couple of years i could have one of these things in the bottom of my trash can and never take out the trash again? yeah science!

That's nothin'

[Anne_Nonymous]

>> Humans may have created the first ever black hole in a lab.

That's nothin'. Three years ago my PHB created a black hole in his office. He calls it a desk, but everyone else knows better.

Re:Interesting Result

[Wolfger]

Even if it's not a black hole, experiments that produce surprising results are always welcome.
I would have said "experiments that produce surprising results and are reproducable are always welcome."

I would have said, "Experiments that produce surprising results and are reproducable and don't cause a major catastrophy are always welcome."