Concern Over Creating Black Holes

Maria Williams writes to tell us about worry surrounding the impending startup of CERN's Large Hadron Collider. Some fear that the device, in creating mini black holes, could jeopardize Life As We Know It. While the tiny black holes should evaporate quickly — throwing off so-called Hawking radiation that can be detected — CERN software developer Ran Livneh reminds us that "Any physicist will tell you that there is no way to prove that generated black holes will decay." The LHC site assures us there's nothing to worry about. The flap is reminiscent of the time the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider went live. The worry then was that "negative strangelets" could gobble up the world.

Comments

Re:Am I the only one that read....

[ArsenneLupin]

No, the black hole will just swallow the hard on, not the whole earth.

Re:The world didn't end last time...

[dgatwood]

Just to clarify, I don't think there's much chance at all that such a tiny black hole would be able to gather enough mass quickly enough to create such a chain reaction. I'd imagine the initial mass needed for such a reaction to be sustainable is probably much larger than we would ever be able to create on Earth. That said, -if- it were the case that it does not dissipate, then there's a potential problem.