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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."
mmmmmmmmmmmm, higher dimensional.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
black saturn
Are you actually suggesting that string theory might actually predict something that the standard model doesn't, and what it predicts might actually be measurable?! That's crazy talk! Next you'll be suggesting that string theory is disprovable and therefore actually science. I'll believe it when it happens.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I can't read the fine article because CyberSitter blocks it. However, I did remember an article a while back that changed the way black holes were perceived to operate.
.pdf showing his original hand-drawn representation along with some of the mathematical principles behind the whole "there is no true event horizon" hypothesis. Where was that? Ah. There we go.
Hm. Maybe google will help me to remember what it was. Oh yes. There it is. Darn. CyberSitter blocks loading that page. I know, user prefs, threshold 5. There we go. Now I can at least see the summary. Click, read, yep, that's the one I remember. Now, Samir Mathur, I remember a very nice
Someone please tell me how the current article lines up with these from years past. Please try to do so without profanity so that I can click my comment and read the reply without CyberSitter dumping the page.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Wait, so Homer was right about the donut shaped universe? Damn Hawking, always taking credit for other people's ideas!
Then suddenly global warming won't seem like such a big deal?
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
I suppose it would be funny to see the Moon or Mars get sucked into nothingness after a catastrophic black hole test. Would be even funnier if one made a "sluuuuuup!" noise as one watched it suck up on itself.
Then the Cyberdemons would invade. Doom had black holes on Mars didn't they? My memory is fuzzy.
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.
A unique way to learn a language: http://languageloom.com
Yeah yeah, typical "not in my back yard!" argument!
Look, buddy! SOMEONE has to get sucked into this black hole, why not you? Huh? Are you too good to get pulled into a string of spegetti and your date erradicated from all exsistance? What makes you so important?
My grandfather was abducted by aliens, the least you could do is get devowered by a massive black hole.
...the dreaded Black Uranus.
That is something you don't want anywhere near you.
Am I the only one concerned that making mini-black holes might suck in the whole earth?
You're not the only one worrying, but trust me, there's no danger of this whatsoever. First of all, they will dissipate almsot instantly due to Hawking radiation. Second of all, they are so tiny that they will rarely (if ever) get close enough to swallow something else. Remember, on an atomic scale there is mostly space. And these things are not just small -they are so small its hard to fathom. They are formed by smashing together protons moving at 99.999999% the speed of light. A black hole (might) be formed, if, during the collision, the resultant density of the object is greater than the density required to form a black hole. The gravity will be no greater than the mass of the objects combining it, so you don't need to worry about it sucking things in. Let me jsut give you an example. A basketball could, theoretically, become a black hole, so long as you compressed its mass into a small enough area -but it would still have the gravitational pull of a basketball. And here, we are talking about turning protons into blackholes! In short, nothing to worry about chap!
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
Black Saturn, the street tough PI that got kicked off the force for refusing to go along with some crooked cops. Now, he dispenses his own brand of street justice, but has a heart of gold that melts all the ladies.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
This had been discussed here, and the plan to create microscopic black holes on Earth is something to be wary of.
It has to do with quantum moderation - a post can be in multiple states at once (offtopic/funny) until you look at it, then it takes assumes one and only one.
First of all, they will dissipate almsot instantly due to Hawking radiation. Second of all, they are so tiny that they will rarely (if ever) get close enough to swallow something else.
Third of all: The kind of (and energy of) collision in question occurs with non-trivial frequency when cosmic rays hit atoms in the atmosphere. If it created a long-lived black hole that could suck down a planet in a geologically short time we would have been down the drain LONG ago.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Don't worry. If the LHC were going to make Earth-swallowing black holes, if there were any real chance at all of it happening, then cosmic rays would have done it long long ago.
Earth-cosmic ray collisions occur at an absolutely fantastic rate, higher than the LHC would ever even dream of. The energies of cosmic rays are distributed across an extremely broad spectrum, extending both above and below LHC energies. If there is any chance of the LHC making an Earth swallowing black hole, then there is precious little chance of the earth being outside of a black hole by tomorrow morning, much less any chance of the earth having survived 4.5 billion years.
Furthermore, pretty much everything in the galaxy, and presumably in the universe, experiences a cosmic ray flux comparable to what the earth sees. If the LHC were going to make planet or star swallowing black holes, then the sky would be mostly nothing but black holes.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
I feel my chances of getting laid drop with every chuckle at this joke.
If you think Lake Geneva and Lake Constance are large, wait until you see Lake Switzerland.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
I always wondered why they added the event horizon nullifier in swiss army knives!
priority: highest
re: micro saturn black holes
1. Formation confirmed
2. Evaporation confirmed not!!!!!!!!
Cosmic ray interactions in the upper atmosphere are performing essentially this exact experiment right now, and have been since the planet formed. If there were any chance of a black hole forming and destroying the earth on a geological time scale, it would've happened already.
Besides, the resultant black hole would be absolutely minute - much much smaller than a proton. At that scale, even the densest of earthly materials is just so much empty space. The mean free path of any such hole would be absolutely huge, meaning that the chances of it getting close enough to even a small handful of atoms to swallow them as it passes through the planet are absolutely tiny.
Dan Simmons called this "The Big Mistake"
Dan Simmons writes science fiction. Perhaps you should try reading a little less sci-fi and a little more real science before yelling at people.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
(My silly comment got me wondering, if a "hole" exists and is orthogonal to the 3 spatial dimensions, then the curvature of spacetime does constitute a 4th spatial (5th spacetime) dimension, right? As a fitting mnemonic, I shall refer to it as the "hyper-anal" dimension!)
no no no you iggorant fool The strings are dangling into the hole and through the process of reverse obfusification the angular momentus is transparently reversified to nullify the boolshiteicus component according to the theory of string-a-lingus-bodingus.
hahaha, women are dumb! haha! take that gender equality!
If it was that easy to make black holes, then cosmic rays could cause black holes...
I think Prof Hawking said that a collider capable of making black holes, would be the size of the solar system.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Because the black holes (if they are formed at all) are not what we are interested in. Additionally, the detectors that we use at LHC weigh on the order of thousands of tons. That'd be an awful big weather balloon to lift them. Furthermore, the detectors we use are very narrowly focused. If a collision doesn't take place nearly exactly at the center of the detector, with the two particles involved having pretty much exactly equal speeds in opposite directions, then our measurements will not be on, or at any rate, the detector will be immensely more difficult to calibrate so that we get some kind of meaningful results from it. Also, having the detector underground, we can shield it from a lot of noise that adds uncertainty to our measurements. Finally, the results are immensely easier to study (in some ways, possible to study) if the particles involved always have nearly the same energies as in every other collision we are studying.
Cosmics have energies spread out over an absolutely huge range of energies. Their timing and location are nigh unto impossible to predict. We don't get anything like a 0 net momentum collision between a cosmic ray and an atmospheric atom. The upper atmosphere is an incredibly noisy place, primarily because of cosmics. We would have an awful hard time telling the difference between a particle that originated from a cosmic-atmosphere collision we were interested in and a stray particle that came from the hadron shower of some other cosmic-atmosphere collision.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
like this or like this or like this or with this if you want to go low tech (light has no charge and is smaller than a proton).
Okay sorry for the flippant answer, basically in particle physics, protons are huge, very large (but not massive) objects. Finding something smaller than them is pretty easy because size doesnt matter. What matters is the strength of its interaction with the rest of the universe. So we find small objects via their interactions with other objects which we can detect in our detectors. No charge makes things a little more tricky but objects can also carry colour charge and weak isospin and thats how we would find an electrically neutral object. Neutrinos, the hardest particles to detector only interact via the weak force and they are almost impossible to see but we do detect them. Also we can detect things like neutrinos by the absence of things, they carry away energy from the collision and we can detect that theres not all the energy there should be.
Shouldn't this kinda thing be done off-planet?
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
Ignorance of 4 days is evil, Evil educators teach 1 day. 1 day will destroy humans.
Saving the World: One Drink at a Time
Things that make you go "Hmm."
Nah, not me. I tend to respect what precious little science knowledge I have by not using it to make up random shit.
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
Don't worry - this thing is a collider and not a plot device.
Look, it's bad enough that you want him to get devoweled by a black hole...
(And why would a black hole only take his vowels, anyway? Is it a conspiracy by the Balkan states, to get us all on an even linguistic footing? But I digress...)
But you have to insult people of Chinese heritage, too?
Geez, At least you didn't say he should be "devowerd by a massive black hore", which would insult another whole group of poeple.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Enough to become N+1 protons, recursively?
OK, time for Physics 101: The mass of the original object collapsing will decide the mass of the black hole. Weight != Mass.
A larger star collapsing will form a larger black hole of the SAME mass.
A molecule collapsing to form a black hole[forced to] will form a black hole of the same mass of the molecule.
The smaller the black hole [smaller mass], the faster it will evaporate due to Hawkins Radiation.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
I agree. If the maths is rigorous & good, then give it breathing space until it's testable - what's the hurry? Why should String theories be bad, even if wrong? If they're wrong, then we'll have those fewer paths to have to choose between. In the meantime, let the equations be what they are. The maths will serve a use (simply by sitting on the shelf, for now) to somebody in the future - if the miseries will allow us, all, to go forth & multiply into that future!
;)
Any of the nay-sayers got a better, with equally conscise maths, idea for pre-'Big Bang'?
[n.b. Forget a 'Matrix' - it discounts Occam's Razor.]
Thats the quantum wave-function of your sex life actualizing.
I, for one, am glad it's not me observing it to collapse the wave function.
3laws: No freebies, no backsies, GTFO.
Please refrain from creating black holes until I have left the solar system...
Uhm...thanks.
But could it create a Black Venus (NWS)?
Funny how some childhood skinemax memories can stick in your brain.
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.
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/
http://physicsmathforums.com/showthread.php?t=56
Tied Up & Strung Out: Hollywood String Theory Movie!!! Looking For Extras!!!
http://revver.com/video/48391/ (WATCH IT!)
ALL TIED UP & STRUNG ALONG, a movie about String Theorists and their expansive theories which extend human ignorance, pomposity, and frailty into higher dimensions, is set to start filming this fall. Jessica Alba, John Cleese, Eugene Levie, Jackie Chan, and David Duchovney of X-files fame have all signed on to the $700 million Hollywood project, which is still cheaper than String Theory itself, and will likely displace less physicists from the academy.
"As contemporary physics is about money, hype, mythology, and chicks," Ed Witten explained from his offices at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, "The next logical step was Hollywood, although I thought Burt Reynolds should play me instead of Eugene Levy."
Brian Greene, the famous String Theorist who will be played by David "the truth is out there" Duchovney, explained the plot: "String theory's muddled, contorted theories that lack postulates, laws, and experimentally-verified equations have Einstein spinning so fast in his grave that it creates a black hole. In order to save the world, we String Theorists have to stop reformulating String Theory faster than the speed of light. We are called upon to stop violating the conservation of energy by mining higher dimensions to publish more BS than can accounted for with the Big Bang alone, and I win the Nobel prize for showing that M-Theory is in fact the dark matter it has been searching for."
Greene continues: "At first my character is reluctant to stop theorizing and start postulating, but when my love interest Jessica Alba is sucked into the black hole, I search my soul and find Paul Davies there, played by John Cleese. I ask him what he's doing in my soul, and he explains that the answer is contained in the mind of God, which only he is privy too, but for a small fee, some tax and tuition dollars, a couple grants here and there, and an all-expense-paid book tour with stops in Zurich and Honolulu, he can let me in on it. And he shows me God in all her greater glory, as he points out that we can make more money in Hollywood than writing coffee-table books that recycle Einstein, Bohr, Dirac, Feynman, and Wheeler. I am quickly converted, and I agree to turn my back on String Theory's hoax and save Jessica Alba."
But it's not that easy, as standing in Greene's way is Michio "king of pop-theory-hipster-irony-the-theory-of-everything- or-anything-made-
you-read-this" Kaku, played by Jackie Chan. Kaku beats the crap out of Greene for alomst blowing the "ironic" pretense his salary, benefits, and all-expense paid trips depend on. "WE MUST HOLD BACK THE YOUNG SCIENTISTS WITH OUR NON-THEORIES!! WE MUST FILL THE ACADEMY WITH THE POMO DARK MATTER THAT IS STRING THEORY TO KEEP OUR UNIVERSE FROM FLYING APART, OUR PYRAMID SCHEMES FROM TOPPLING, AND OUR PERPETUAL-MOTION NSF MONEY MACHINE FROM STOPPING!!" Kaku argues as he delivers a flying back-kick, "There can be ony ONE! I WILL be String Theory's GODFATHER as referenced on my web page!! I have better hair!"
But Greene fights back as he signs his seventeenth book deal to make the hand-waving incoherence of String Theory accessible to the South Park generation, senior citizens, and starving chirldren around the world. "Kaku! Kaku! (pronounced Ka-Kaw! Ka-Kaw! like Owen Wilson did in Bottle Rocket)," Greene shouts. "It is theoretically impossible to build a coffee tables strong enough to support any more coffee-table physics books!!!"
"Time travel is also theoretically impossible, but there's a helluva lot more money for us in flushing physics down a wormhole. Nobody knows what the #&#%&$ M stands for in M theory ya hand-waving, TV-hogging crank!!! Get it?? Ha Ha Ha! We're laughing at the public! We're the inside
You don't understand the Time Cube, do you?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.