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

There is no stinking Higgs particle

[sweetser]

The reason several billion dollars are going into the electromagnetic crop circle known as the Large Hadron Collider is to detect the Higgs particle. The standard model of physics predicts all the detected particles we have seen out there. The model can be represented by the symmetry groups U(1) for EM, SU(2) for the weak force, and SU(3) for the strong force. Well, it can do that so long as none of the none forces has a mass. Oops, that's not what the experimentalist tell us.

So what do theoretical physicists do? They try to sneak in something without breaking it. That is what is known as Higgs mechanism, or the false vacuum Mexican hat dance. Instead of saying the vacuum is a vacuum is the home field of zero, it is claimed that vacuum is utterly false, there is a Higgs field everywhere there can be a where, so that fundamental particles can get some mass when they need it (always). This mathematical trick works because it doesn't mess up the symmetry in the Lagrangian (a fancy way of writing all the interactions that can happen in a volume), but does get the vacuum to add the mass back in.

You may have noticed gravity is not in the standard model. Guess what is going to happen when gravity gets in? Gravity will break the nice symmetry, and no Higgs boson will be needed.

The uber-sophisticated will complain (whine) that gravity is done by a spin 2 particle, but the Higgs is all about inertia, so it must be spin 0. This is not a flaw, it is a sign from Einstein, specifically the equivalence principle that gravitational mass (the spin 2 thing) must be cow-tied to inertial pass (the spin 0 thing). There is no way to wrestle a steer to the ground unless those two are expressions of one and the same thing.

The way I do it, because of course I have my own personal unified field theory, is to use a second rank symmetric field strength tensor for gravity and the spin 2 stuff, and then use the trace of that very same tensor for the spin 0 Higgslike stuff.

Blowing sophisticated bubbles out my butt,
doug