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Atom Smasher May Create "Black Saturns"
David Shiga writes "If we ever make black holes on Earth, they might be much stranger objects than the star-swallowing monsters known to exist in space. According to a new theory, any black hole that pops out of the Large Hadron Collider under construction in Switzerland might be surrounded by a black ring — forming a microscopic 'black Saturn'. This could happen if extra dimensions exist, as string theory suggests, and if they are large enough." An evocative excerpt from the article: "...there is an outside chance that in a few years in a tunnel near Geneva, physicists will make a black hole far smaller than a proton and circled by a squashed four-dimensional black doughnut."
That was what I thought when I read the article. One of the major complaints about string theory has been that there's supposedly no way to test it experimentally. But the article says such a structure could only exist if there are really four dimensions. So if we succeed in creating one, would that be an experimental confirmation of string theory? Seems to me, at the very least it would confirm one of the major premises.
In theory, such a small black hole will not have enough gravitational pull to keep itself together for very long, much less pull in other matter. Such a black hole should only last a few nanoseconds (if even that), then dissipate... in theory.
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From the article:
... a black hole far smaller than a proton and circled by a squashed four-dimensional black doughnut ...
I get the impression that the "small size" thing is supposed to be reassuring. But aren't all black holes comparatively small, compared to what they've had for lunch? How big would a black hole be that, say, had accidentally swallowed the Earth? And I suppose mass should also reassure me. But the thing is, my gradeschool science oversimplification of black holes said their defining characteristic was not their mass but their insatiable, chain-reaction-like desire to swallow more mass ... like a rolling snowball.
And it's all well and good to say some theoretical rays we've never seen before will magically swing in at the end and save us, but... Since this is testing an unproven theory and not applying a well-understood theory, what are the procedures for evaluating the level of risk?
And what is the recourse of those who don't agree? Science has ethical guidelines for not experimenting on humans because of risk. Does the fact that humans are in the next room ... or the next building ... or the next city, "safely away" from the black hole being created, mean that there is no ethical obligation for informed consent? It would seem like there are more rules governing putting make-up on a rat than there are on this kind of experimentation...
I don't know the details of this kind of thing. I just have to trust someone doing them does. But I wonder exactly what I'm trusting. Anyone know?
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
I don't know about you, but I'm going to be keeping a shotgun and a chainsaw close by at all times!
You're using her as bait, Master!
It's real easy to beat up on an amateur on Slashdot isn't it? You'll even get modded up. Regardless, a wide segment of the scientific community look at string theory as something interesting which isn't much good for anything. Why? Because whenever someone finds a prediction with string theory that differs from observed data the string theorists have a reason why this doesn't disprove the theory. Time and again, string theory has been shown not to be disprovable. The standard model, on the other hand, has not. That's the difference.. that's what makes string theory not science. It may be interesting.. it may give us insights into how things may work, but you can't call it science. Now, if you disagree with me, please, don't take it up with me.. I'm just an amateur. Take it up with the scientific community.
How we know is more important than what we know.
String theory makes several predictions that are expected to be testable in the near future. String theory being untestable is a pop science myth that distorts the underlying truth -- string theory unfortunately has lots of parameters that need to be tuned.
Copied from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacetime
If youre new to John Titor, heres the complete archive of his texts:r _project.html
p g1
. cgi?noframes;read=165532
h tml
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/pages/the_john_tito
An interesting interview with Larry Flynt:
http://www.larryflynt.com/notebook.php?id=95
I have my fair deal of scepticism against John Titor and the claims he has traveled from the future to fetch an old IBM machine besides testing the time-machine, but so much that he wrote about in 2000-2001 thereabouts, has in fact come true. These are just the broad ones:
http://johntitor.strategicbrains.com/
This is yet another drop in this mans pretty hefty prediction bucket. At the time of this link, there were no mentions of black holes being generated in the new smasher, but now it seems that this too will come true (if possible), and very much in the same timeframe as predicted too!
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread124980/
This is the person who even told Hawking was wrong, and later Hawkin conceded he was wrong on the subject!
http://www.surfingtheapocalypse.net/cgi-bin/forum
Time Traveller The Movie. John Titor doesnt HAVE to be proven correct. WE can DO something about it, starting with ourselves!
http://www.fasttrackproductions.biz/TimeTravel_0.
A site that is covering news in the media and corelating it with Titors predictions:
http://www.johntitor.com/
I dont claim any of this is true, in whatever what you regard as truth, but when reading this, it is startling how accurate the person who wrote those messages in 2000-2001, is describing the trends of our society, problems of the US, Mac Cow Disease, CERN beginning to experiment with mini-black holes, and much more.. For the sake of our planet, and our future, it is worth considering living as THOUGH weve already been through this, than not. He describes a more primitive, but also a more enlightened society if you read the archives from the first link.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
You must have been misinformed.
Lorentz invariance. Could very conceivably be observed to not hold. Especially since we haven't studied it yet at the high energies the LHC will give us. If Lorentz invariance fails at any energy, string theory (along with most 20th century physics) fails completely.
Number of dimensions. If we do extra dimension searches at LHC (and believe me, they will be done) and find that there are 7,342 dimensions, string theory will be ruled out. Interestingly, Quantum Field Theory will not.
These are two conceivable observations which would rule out string theory, and make string theorists give up on string theory. There are many others. The fact that they coincide with predictions from other theories (for the most part, the number of dimensions doesn't coincide simply because QFT doesn't nail down a number of dimensions) doesn't make them any less predictions.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.