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Black Holes From the LHC Could Last For Minutes
KentuckyFC writes "There is absolutely, positively, definitely no chance of the LHC destroying the planet (or this way either) when it eventually switches on some time later this year. And yet a few niggling doubts are persuading some scientists to run through their figures again. One potential method of destruction is that the LHC will create tiny black holes that could swallow everything in their path, including the planet. Various scientists have said this will not happen because the black holes would decay before they could do any damage. But physicists who have re-run the calculations now say that the mini black holes produced by the LHC could last for seconds, possibly minutes. Of course, the real question is whether they decay faster than they can grow. The new calculations suggest that the decay mechanism should win over and that the catastrophic growth of a black hole from the LHC 'does not seem possible' (abstract). But shouldn't we require better assurance than that?"
From the Summary:
"Black holes...a few niggling doubts..."
Yes, it is well known that niglings begin life by coming out of black holes, but wouldn't it be wiser to provide birf control to the black holes given the state of the economy? Fortunately Obama recently authorized abortion funding to ass-backward savage lands which are not specified officially but are known to be Africa, proud motherland of the apes, chimpanzees, macaques, baboons
I can't help but think of one of my favorite The Soup clips every time I hear about the LHC now.
I am MuchTall
1. My Barber
2. My urologist during my vasectomy.
3. The LHC scientists during the first collisions.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
"haven't accounted for 96% of the energy and mass of the universe in their current model."
BUT...they also haven't accounted for all possible group particle mergers and interactions in the LHC. Unlike nature, in a particle accelerator they have groups of high energy particles moving in close proximity. In nature, we have lone high energy particles. We don't know what we can create in group collision mergers of high energy particles and even though these are rare compared with single particle interactions, they can still occur. Even if a black hole like particle was briefly formed and then hit by another particle or two or twenty, then what?. The point is, we simply don't know whats possible, but its very likely to be a different situation than simply a lone particle able to break down. If a group collision merger occured in nature, it would most likely be very rarely occuring, but it could be enough to help account for some fraction of the mass of the universe. We simply don't know, but we do know that in a particle accelerator, its going to happen a lot more often than in nature and we don't know what kinds of reactions group high energy mergers could cause.
While its (mostly) safe to assume single high energy particles are not going to be a problem, as they happen relatively often in nature, we cannot say the same for multiple collsion mergers and all possible interactions of multiple particles, as we simply do not know for sure. The current various theories are not proof its safe and the fact we cannot account for so much energy and mass in the universe is a very good reason to suspect our theories are wrong.
Also the fact they are building the LHC is proof in itself that they build it to learn, so they don't currently know for sure. Also for all their planning, even that magnet failure showed their theories and multi-million dollar design plans about how the machine should function can still go wrong. Humans make mistakes. Thats fine, we all accept that, but making a mistake with the LHC could potentially be the most serious mistake in human history.
What concerns me is their intense desire to learn is going to bias their judgment. (I know my desire to learn has biased my judgment from time to time), but this is the most important experiment in human history, so its vital it doesn't go wrong in any way, or it could be the last experiment.
=Smidge=
Is it just my observation, or is eldavojohn an idiot?
And I'm not just talking about the glowing accretion disk around the hole. If we do generate black holes that swallow the Earth, at least worrying about that will take our minds off the economy!
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Well its good to know that despite their uncertainty about the the data, they are absolutely certain of their conclusions.
...there's one sure way to find out.
Fire it up, boys!
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
I thought that this entire line of doomerism had been dispensed with thanks to cosmic rays.
Since cosmic rays are striking the earth all the time, and a decent percentage of them have a much higher energy level than anything the LHC can produce, we should have already seen such a phenomena.
?
Absolute statements are never true
Hey guys, we thought the first nuclear bomb might burn up the atmosphere and we survived that! Guys?
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
...Or "Knowing Enough to Be Dangerous".
Stay tuned, as Rocky and Bullwinkle court certain doom!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
But shouldn't we require better assurance than that?
What better assurance can we get than mathematical formulas? Unfortunately the only other way to find out is to run an experiment, right? I just hope their formulas and the assumptions they are based on are correct.
Developers: We can use your help.
And there's no possible way that Stimpy would be stupid enough to press the beautiful, shiny button - the jolly, candy-like button.
and nothing of value was lost?
The Sun in conjunction with the Earth's atmosphere has been colliding particles with WAY higher energies that the LHC could ever manage for billions of years now. As far as I know we've not been consumed by a mini black hole yet.
The gift of death metal does not smile on the good looking.
This could be why we do not see Advanced Alien Civilizations - their technological sophistication gets to a point where they eventually play with some sort of basic question of physics and have a planet ending disaster. Yet another reason to colonize Mars, and do this type of research there.
Anything that could happen due to the LHC, already happens daily. The collisions in the LHC aren't as energetic as collisions that occur in the upper atmosphere from cosmic rays, etc ALL OF THE TIME. The reason to build the LHC and other accelerators is that it's kind of a pain in the ass to mount detectors on balloons and *hope* that your detector intercepts some of said cosmic rays...
i would prefer something a bit more positive than "The new calculations *suggest* that the decay mechanism *should* win over". i'm sort of hoping its just sloppy use of language rather than sloppy math.
What about the assurances in the fact that protons with energies on the order of the energy in the LHC, and several orders of magnitude larger, have been bombarding the planet for billions of years without any stable black hole forming, ever? I'm sure that for almost any event you can find some incredibly unlikely scenario of it triggering a sequence of events that will doom humanity. But it's not generally seen as a reason to stop doing things. Because it's never happened despite things going on for quite some time now.
You and what army are going to hold them accountable when they destroy the planet?
Yeah. Exactly.
The Yasashii Syndicate ||
The Large Hardon Collider will fuck us all.
Like, "It seriously is un-possible dude!"
Yeah, I would really feel a lot better if the LHC deployed Bruce Campbell, with a shotgun during those Black Hole experiments:
Evil Witch/Black Hole: "I'll swallow your soul! I'll swallow your soul!"
Bruce points his shotgun at the Evil Witch/Black Hole:
Bruce: "Swallow this."
*Blam*
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
those mini black holes were up in the air, not next to the earth you ninny.
sheesh, next thing someone will make a video game with this scenario
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
when they say seconds and minutes is that in normal earth time or according to the time inside the micro event horizon?
Groups of high energy particles striking each other is not rare in nature. It happens all the time, right in our own atmosphere, on the surface of the moon.
This is all Chicken-Little nonsense.
1) Build a collider 'thinggy'
2) Create a blackhole which consumes the entire universe... into a single point.
3) this causes a "Big Bang"
4) Big Bang re-creates 'life'
5) 'life' gets too smart for its own good - Goto step 1
Finally, we may have resolved the Fermi Paradox.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Are scientists at the LHC attempting to model US Federal spending?
End anonymous moderation and posting on
(Of course, it is fiction. But Clarke's other fiction predicted communications satellites in geo stationary orbits too.)
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The main thing to keep in mind is, cosmic rays have energies vastly higher than the LHC. If the LHC could produce black holes, then there would be black holes floating around everywhere.
Peronally I am looking forward to mini black holes. So long as the mass is under several thousand tons even dropping a black hole in to the earths core wouldn't hurt the planet.
BUT...
black holes provide pure matter to energy conversion! A tiny black hole feed with matter will radiate generate matter-antimatter pairs which will generate a huge amount of heat!
So..
#1 create tiny black hole and put a charge on it.
#2 create powerplant around it to collect the energy
#3 PROFIT!
There will be no black holes, well except for very tiny ones that will wink out of existence in mere nanoseconds. Certainly no more than a couple of microseconds. At most a second. Likely tops of a minute. Absolutely can't be more than seven minutes ...
A miserable little pile of hadrons!
But enough talk, have at you!
Everyone wins a free trip to France.
Intelligence is not merely logic, rationality, experience, and knowledge but also taking the unknown into account. The parent post is a fine example of intelligence.
Can't they move this thing to the moon and control it remotely, they should have plenty of room for a nuclear power plant of its very own...and if it gets swallowed in a small black hole at least we might have a chance.
... will cause a chain reaction causing the atmosphere to ignite and destroy all life on the planet.
There's always some crackpot who thinks an experiment is going to end the world.
Maybe whenever we observe a supernova its because an advanced civilization in that vicinity threw the switch on their LHC variant. If we are stupid enough to destroy everything then we'll get what we deserve. Darwin had something, I think.
call as I flip, charmed or strange.. .
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
If it works as they describe, I wonder if we haven't invented a waste disposal system of some sort? Just shove all of our crap into a singularity like they do on Futurama!
I would love to see a kitchen model! Man! Sure would save me from having to take out the trash!
> Various scientists have said this will not happen because the black holes would decay
> before they could do any damage.
The argument is stronger than that. Even if the holes don't decay at all their collision cross-sections are so small that they cannot get big enough to matter before the sun turns into a red giant and swallows the Earth.
An even stronger argument is that if the LHC can create such holes so can cosmic rays and yet we are still here.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Well, Arthur C Clarke's novel, "The Imperial Earth" speculates that mini black holes would be the source of power for the rockets flying between Jupiter and Earth
And don't forget Charles Sheffield's McAndrew stories, collected as The McAndrew Chronicles. Great stuff if you're a fan of technically accurate science fiction.
"It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull." -- H.L. Mencken
"Doubt is not a pleasant mental state, but certainty is a ridiculous one." -- Voltaire
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies." -- Friedrich Nietzsche
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
A black hole is just the gravity well of a given mass compressed into a sufficiently small space. In this case, the given mass is miniscule, so very little (practically nothing, hence the "evaporation" issue) will be drawn to it.
You have more to worry about from the gravitational pull of your shoes.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
If they had 100% confidence in this property of black holes, why are they studying them?
Of course, part of me doesn't care, simply because getting swallowed in a black hole is probably a painless way to go, so I won't know or care at that point.
Another part of me wonders if black hole experiments are the answer to the Fermi Paradox.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
It's the ice-9 strangelets that have me worried.
Life would be easier if I had the source code.
If you bothered to go past the Slashdot summary of the arXiv blog summary of the paper's abstract summary, and actually RTFA by Casadio et al., you would find the following:
and also this:
Possibly, potentially, maybe, under certain conditions, they might be longer lived than expected. They still can't grow.
Go back to worrying about your 401Ks.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
We'll only find out if "we" were right if "we" are indeed right or if there's an afterlife conducive to "I told you so!" chatting.
So shall we say we have about 50.01% chance of finding out?
And people say religious faith is anti-science... twaddle! :)
Make no worry, Sir. There is absolutely no chance that anything harmful may happen here.
Oh, wait...
They would see that it is based on a highly speculative model where the authors argue "against the possibility of catastrophic black hole growth at the LHC."
anti-science types will have a field day with this new "scare"...
maximum LHC center-of-mass energy (in a Pb-Pb collision): ~1.14e15 eV
cosmic ray flux at Earth's upper atmosphere: ~1 per km^2 per year with energy > 10^19 eV
Collisions 10,000 times more energetic occur multiple times every day over your head, and you're still here. Except now, we can finally reproduce them for study in the lab.
It reminds me of the start of this book...
http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/16-ClawsThatCatchCD/ClawsThatCatchCD/Into%20the%20Looking%20Glass/Into_the_Looking_Glass.htm
It starts off with what first appears a nuclear level explosion without any radiation or EMP at a major university. It's quickly determined that it wasn't terrorists or nuclear research. So WTH did the guy do to not only blow up the university but a good chuck of the nearby city as well?
The first chapters of getting a multiple PHd guy in to look at it were pretty much all. "This shouldn't be possible by what we we know!"
I'll agree that comic rays are most likely safe. It's obvious that Earth or the Sun can handle them. It isn't really obvious at all WTH this stuff will do. Sort of reminds me of the early nuclear experiments. They were worried about igniting Earth's atmosphere on fire with the first couple of tests and not being able to stop it. Sort of like a Perry Rhodan's Arkon Bomb. (That thing was a fictional bomb that once set off on a planet would start an unstoppable nuclear chain reaction in everything above atomic number 12.)
When you've only got one planet, and no means of escape, you shouldn't be doing some tests there. There are some tests that we'd most likely rather be held on Pluto or in the next solar system. The problem is that its far easier to worry about this stuff than to know one way or another if you even need to worry about it.
I'm sure that if we were an FTL species looking at others that we'd find many "oops" worlds where civs higher than our wiped themselves out by unexplainable means. Problem being is that we don't know what "oops" tech lines to really avoid. (We'd still research them though. You know we would.)
If they're right the benefit to humanity could be enormous.
If they're wrong then it's the end of the economic crisis, unemployment, conflict in the Middle East and world hunger.
So, on balance ... I think they should do it.
No sig today...
The new calculations suggest that the decay mechanism should win over and that the catastrophic growth...'does not seem possible'. But shouldn't we require better assurance than that?"
They could be talking about the economy and it would still make sense...
A the destructive influence of a black holes in the vastness of the universe is pretty small.
If one in Switzerland started growing from microscopic size it might seem like sort of a big deal. But if they take a billion years to grow then what is the problem? Put a SEP field around it and call it a done deal.
A black hole composed of a single proton has no more mass than a single proton. It will therefore attract things towards itself no more than a single proton would.
If it flew into a wall, it would still not "suck in" even a single other proton, neutron or electron, as its gravity is so ridiculously weak compared to the other forces.
And regardless - collisions of LHC intensity occur continuously in the upper atmosphere. These may or may not produce mini black holes, and these may or may not last for up to several minutes. But they clearly have not destroyed the planet!
</crusade>
As I see it (and as was mentioned before), the only way to confirm the assumptions is to test. One of two things will happen: 1. The rate of decay will be faster than the rate of growth and we'll all be fine. 2. Nobody will be around to bitch. If there's nobody to tell you I told you so, is there any reason not to test the theory?
... as long as there is a crowbar at hand at the LHC.
There was a paper on arxiv that was mentioned in an editorial in Nature Physics recently (vol 5, january 2009), that raised an interesting point.
The paper, "Probing the Improbable: Methodological Challenges for Risks with Low Probabilities and High Stakes", discusses risks assessment, and begins talking about the LHC specifically on page 10.
Essentially, it argues that given an argument A, for some event X, the probability of that event happening is not just simply P(x). That is only the conditional probability, P(X; A).
The full probability is that term plus P(X; not A)P(not A), which in other words is the probably of X occurring if argument A is not true, multiplied by the probability that A is not true.
If you apply that specifically to particle accelerators, what this means is that the full probability of producing a growing black hole is the sum of two terms:
1) The probability of producing a growing black hole if Quantum Field Theory, Quantum Chromo-dynamics, and the like are TRUE
2) The probability of producing a growing black hole if QFT, QCD, etc are FALSE; multiplied by the probability that those theories are false.
The first term is very small, and is the reason physicists are not concerned. But the Nature Physics article asks, "Has anyone calculated the 2nd term?"
Even if Hawking Radiation does not exist in nature, there is no danger from uncharged micro black holes produced by the LHC. Any black holes produced would have a mass of a few plank units and would be extremely small in size. Obviously, as black holes, they would have an inescapable event horizon and space-time would be extremely distorted very close to them.
However, because they would be so small and because gravity is so very weak compared to the other forces, such a tiny micro black hole could pass through a nucleus without significantly interacting with the nucleons. Basically, it would need to happen to "directly" hit a quark to swallow it and grow in size. This highly unlikely event (nuclei are mostly empty space) would have to repeat several times before the black hole became large enough to start sucking in nearby matter in a run-away process. Instead, the micro black hole would settle to the centre of the Earth and not significantly interact with other matter or "swallow" anything up.
A natural inclination, I think, (and it certainly is mine) is to think of a black hole necessarily sucking in everything around it. But the whole point of truly small micro black holes is that it is very low-mass and thus has very weak gravitational attraction, although of course highly concentrated.
Outstanding question (for me): This assumes that any micro black holes produced by the LHC would be uncharged. Is this a valid assumption? (I remember reading that it was, but now I can't remember why.)
Atheism is a religion to the same extent that not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Even if the black holes lasted indefinately, their cross sectional area is too small to pick up any significant amount of matter. The Earth would be swallowed up by the sun long before the black hole began to threaten Earth in any way.
If the LHC manages to create mini blck holes, let's be clear here, tese will be very very mini. A black hole weighing what? Same as a couple atoms of carbon?
Consider that even if matter collapses to a singularity, its gravitational effect is still just proportional to its mass. Given that the LHC is a vacuum where the collisions are occuring, the blackhole could only ever mass the sum total of the mass of the particles used in the collision. From a casual outside observer you wouldn't even notice, and the black hole would decay before it could acquire more mass.
Phase 1: Create black hole Phase 2: Phase 3: Profit!
Ice-9 melts at 45.8 C. If everybody increases their output of methane gases considerably to help global warming, we would solve the problem of ice-9.
* Citation needed
The truth is, we don't know for sure, or else we wouldn't be doing experiments.
When we throw a tennis ball into it...where will it come out?
You heard him boys! Get moving cranking these things out so we get more funding.
The most energetic particle that the LHC can create is 574 TeV/particle lead nuclei. Nature has been bombarding our solar system with a significant flux of particles as powerful as 100 million TeV for as long as it's been around. If it was possible to spawn a black hole capable of consuming a planet from a collision with a particle a mere thousand TeV in energy, then it is all but certain that we would have seen every large body in our solar system converted from billions of years of bombardment from cosmics ray 100,000 times more energetic (caveat: much more energy is available for consumption into a black hole should two particles collide "head-on" with opposing momenta versus a fast particle with a stationary target).
Though, the above reasoning does not exclude the possibility that black holes that may last minutes but yet not consume planets.
~Ben
C'mon baby! The world is going to end when they fire up the LHC. We need to do it as much as we can.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
Who has the doubt? You? Okay, you personally do not count, because you're entirely uneducated on the subject matter.
If there was some doubt by a sizable portion of reputable scientists who used theories that other scientists had proven to be likely models, that would be one thing.
You, random slashdotter, are not even one thing.
Actually this is great! Being across the pond, I should have the benefit of at least a femtosecond to be the first to write and publish a paper on the effects of gravity waves before I go. After all, those Europeans are going to be pretty much getting all the glory and making it much harder for us on this side to be recognized for any new discoveries. With this type of discovery, and it being so close to home, they likely won't even see it coming. And for a Scientist there is surely nothing like getting really embedded into your work to make you forget to publish. But face it, sometimes its just better to distance yourself for a more objective look at a situation.
Is it heavier than 1 Âg of lead? Or 1 Âg of feathers?
What is the gravitational pull of any of those?
Is a feather going to swallow the earth whole through its fantastic gravitational pull?
That "Ag" was "microgram".
Just implement UTF-8 already!
Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the world yet?
By the amazing gravitational pull of the 10^-10 g or so of that amazing tiny black hole?
I wonder, if the people that talk about how the LHC will destroy the world, know what Cosmic Rays are, that we are being constantly bombarded by them and that they have energies thousands of times higher than anything that can be done at the LHC!
"But shouldn't we require better assurance than that?" No.
I'm not ignorant to bleeding edge science and I can say reasonably that the LHC most likely won't destroy the Earth, but are they certain?
It's like saying that your warp drive isn't going to blow you up.
because it's all based on theory without any observation. We've never seen a black hole, how they form, or their real effects on matter close to them.
It's like looking at a picture of a lion and saying, nah it won't eat you, it will only look at you and walk away.
They're using their grammar skills there.
The LHC started operation on September 10, 2008. Only nine days later, a 'hot spot' formed which resulted in one ton of liquid helium being released and major damage to the LHC. Now, they have inspected and are redoing the calculations on the presumably ridiculously impossible formation of a persistent black hole. Maybe they are now investigating the idea that the damage was caused by a persistent black hole that lasted for 'minutes' before disappearing. From the BBC:
"Cern has procedures in place to deal with quenches before they damage equipment, but in this instance a hot spot in the machine got out of control."
Officially, CERN has said that the hot spot was caused by an electrical fault. I haven't yet found the 'electrical fault' story to be convincing. If the damage was actually caused by the formation of a black hole which persisted for several seconds or even minutes, then it's unlikely that the LHC will ever be operated successfully until they can either prevent the formation of such a black hole (unlikely) or redesign to prevent the black hole from damaging the system (also unlikely). Perhaps the LHC will become the world's largest and most expensive manmade tourist attraction.
The new calculations suggest that the decay mechanism should win over... [emphasis mine]
It's weasel words like the ones above that make folks nervous. If it can't happen, then say so and quit hedging your bets.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
The conclusion says:
> Furthermore, the larger Mc is taken to be,
> the longer a black hole takes to reach its
> maximum value and the less time it remains
> near its maximum value before exiting the
> Earth.
What happens when it does exit the Earth? and go somewhere where there is more mass... like the sun?
There's a very simple test to check on the LHC:
http://hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/
This is lending credence to my theory that black holes are not created by imploding stars but rather by alien civilizations that have activated their LHCs.
The manifest absurdity of it is too obvious to require explanation
The LHC black holes are not new. Physicists have seen super-heavy particles hitting the upper atmosphere for some time. These particles are huge (something like half the plank mass, but memory is a bit fuzzy ), and moving very fast. It is not known where these particles originate from, but the idea of the black holes in the LHC is based on the same mechanism. The LHC black holes would get generated very similarly to the mechanism that these super heavy particles possibly generate black holes in the upper atmosphere. See http://www.college.ucla.edu/news/07/ultra-high-energy-particles.html and http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7598996.stm for more info
I find it hilarious how people say, "Before we run an experiment, we need to know what will happen!" Hello, McFly! You run experiments to FIND OUT WHAT WILL HAPPEN. That's, uhm, the whole FRAKING DEFINITION OF THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD! You can do the math, you can form theories, you can hypothesize... but you never know FOR SURE until you flip the switch.
People like the OP were probably standing around in caveman days, saying, "Ugh. No make fire. What if fire is monster, kill everyone? Bad thing. Not make fire unless know not monster."
'Of course, the real question is whether they decay faster than they can grow.'
IAMAP, but another 'real question' that would make this one moot is whether such events happen all the time anyway...
A couple of billions years of being fine is a pretty good indicator that the procedure is safe. So the real question is whether these mini-black holes occur in nature.
IAIFARSIJDPOOTV - I Am In Fact A Reality Star; I Just Don't Play One On TV
If the LHC creates a black hole that swallows the earth, at least we will have solved Fermi's Paradox.
A witty
The LHC never had any collisions before the accident. The energy of the beam was only 450 GeV (injector energy) which is the energy of a previous experiment (UA1 and UA2), and much less than the 1800 GeV currently running at the Tevatron in Chicago. There were no black holes. It was a quench in a superconducting connector. Melted, arced, punctured helium vessel, and exploded.
Now stop your fear-mongering speculation and go find something useful to do with yourself. People have died because of stupid fear-mongering like yours.
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
I hope the scientists don't make the usual NASA mistake of confusing metric figures and imperial figures when doing their black hole calculations.
"Donâ(TM)t create black holes. The current theory of what powers them is incorrect.
The true source of a black holes gravitational energy isnâ(TM)t the mass that gets sucked into it. That mass gets destroyed in the singularity. So does the energy it is composed of. It gets destroyed when the gravitational force that sucks it in makes it exceed the speed of light because exceeding the speed of light in space destroys the representation of the Dirac Sea; i.e., it destroys light, energy, matter, and spacetime. The singularity inside a black hole is the only thing that violates the conservation of energy. There is a universal law more powerful than the conservation of energy. That is the conservation of nonexistence. Nonexistence cannot be destroyed because it is nonexistent. It is the lack of existence. The conservation of nonexistence is the first cause of symmetry. It is the cause of dark energy and the cause of the Dirac Sea.
Inside the event horizon of a black hole lies nonexistence. No Dirac Sea. No energy. No space. No time. No dimensions. Black holes are powered by the dark energy difference between the nonexistence inside the black hole and normal space outside it. If you donâ(TM)t know this, there is a finite chance you could destroy the earth. The energy of the Dirac Sea outside the black hole is inexhaustable. It is the most powerful energy source in the universe. We donâ(TM)t know how to contain it.
As far as cosmic rays, the creation of a black hole involves more than energy. The thing that actually triggers the creation of a black hole is energy being forced to exceed the speed of light in free space. Cosmic rays donâ(TM)t do that, unless they get sucked into a black hole.
This is based on research still to be published. Ignore at your peril."
SURELY NOT!!!!!
Haven't any of these scientists watched Event Horizon?!
Black holes aren't a natural phenomenon. Must we lose another technologically advanced culture?
-Peter
What's up with that?
Love sees no species.
Wasn't it a micro balck hole lost by scientists that made the Earth self-aware in David Brin's novel Earth? It's been a while since I read it.
I am very confident and I am willing to bet $10,000 that the LHC will not do anything disastrous on a global scale.
Guess what nerds. I don't care about the physics research. If there's a non-zero chance it will kill me, I say shut it off.
And don't start telling me there's a non-zero chance I'll be killed every morning if I drive my car to work or some crap like that. I don't care. When I drive my car it's a risk I take on because it provides real, relevant benefits to my life. The LHC provides no real, relevant benefits to anyone. So keep it shut off.
Their energies will have a variable spectrum. Several GeV differences. When they collide, that inequality is reserved as momentum.
Now how much energy is in such a particle going at escape velocity (a mere 11000m/s)?
MeV? Maybe a fraction of an MeV.
So this particle will in all likelihood have escape velocity and leave the earth after one quick pass.
From LHC Repair Guy 1: Hey, do you think this will work?
From LHC Repair Guy 2: Well it'll suck if it don't.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
If the tiny ones don't blow up, how do the big ones get started?
How is a mini black hole supposed to do anything anyway? I know with the big ones you have lots of mass in a very small space thus gravity is strong. the earth is 1G because mos of the time you are very far from its discrete particles. (I'm being attracted by dirt in china but its far away, that's why gravity within a spherical shell integrates to nothing) but if all that Chinese dirt were all within a few feet of me gravity would be stronger.
an LHC black hole would be of negligible mass. aren't they pretty much colliding single atoms? so wouldn't the total mass be at most what 2 atoms worth. I don't care how dense it is there's only so much gravity you can get out of 2 atoms. and as close as atoms usually are to each other (and unaffected by each others gravity) i would think that one of these black holes could pass clean through solid matter without anything getting close enough to be "sucked in"
anyway Thad's how I've always seen it perhaps someone can correct my concept of these phenomena
If we are destroyed the rest assured we shall be remembered as being "Mostly Harmless"
carbon sequestering doesn't work, it just puts off the problem for someone else to worry about, and wrecks an environment not designed to deal with the additional carbon.
But shoving the carbon into a black hole...now, there's an idea! Sequestering is for the weak and technologically-impaired, we have black holes at our disposal!
Got any proof to back that up?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
You and what army are going to hold them accountable when they destroy the planet?
Yeah. Exactly.
Any what exactly makes you think they could destroy the planet?
Some sensationalist twit who's never taken a real physics course?
Yeah. Exactly.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Oh, damn, too late. The Black Hole (2006)
just curious, how mini are "mini black holes"? and how fast do the "suck"?
Laith Juwaidah http://www.ljuwaidah.org
No. The fact is that the mass of the particles is going to be negligible compared to your arm, and the size is going to be negligible compared to atoms. The Shwarzchild radius for a 1kg black hole is ~1.5 x 10^-27 m, or 12 orders of magnitude smaller than radius of the nucleus of an atom.
These black holes aren't going to have appreciable gravitational pull, and they aren't going to have appreciable cross section to actually absorb matter.
The truth is, we already know darn well what is going to happen macroscopically. We know physics pretty darn well. Its the very fine details that we aren't sure about.
Small black holes are far less dangerous than made out to be.
A while back we had a family of small black holes living in our basement, and I found that if you didn't bother them, they wouldn't bother you.
The wife wanted rid of them, but I said no, they're not doing any harm to anyone - and anyway we never used that part of the basement.
Eventually they just moved on.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
I, for one, welcome our singular overlords.
No-one is stopping you analyzing the data and getting a Nobel for finding a new particle. Wherever you are. The ATLAS data for one is being sent all around the planet for analysis as there is too much for CERN to analyze. http://atlas.ch/
Anyone wonder if their target date for their full scale wormhole tests will be December 21, 2012?
WHen I was a child, the protons, electrons, and neutrons was the smallest divisible item. And I was taught that nothing would be more divisible. Likewise, I was taught that DNA did no work, just served as a map. When I argued with my profs and received a grade hit, because they said that it could not POSSIBLY be more than a map. My argument was that it HAD to do work, because life will always move towards lowest energy needed. THen 2 years later, a CU grad student paid attention to a side effect.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I know more about this than they do, and they call themselves scientists, while I don't. I think that's sad, not only for them, but for all of us. That's all I have to say.
Please consult with a physicist if your black hole lasts for more than 4 hours...
It seems to me that if the earth is going to be destroyed by the LHC, from what I've read, it wont happen in a slow painful way...
Yeah, I've got nothing...
Now I know what happened to it.
Scientist from former planet #5: "definitely no chance of the LHC destroying the planet"
Scientist from former planet #5: Switches on LHC.
Former planet #5: Poof!
Thanks to eating disorders most chicks are reasonably good looking these days.
The black hole would probably take a while to swallow the whole planet. That day would be a party of unrivaled proportions.
Here's an interesting thought.
1kg black hole would have a cross sectional area far smaller than that of an atomic nucleus (or electron, or even the elementary particles), and gravity will be too small to do any attractions.
How would electroweak and strong forces apply to this? I can certainly theorize that since strong forces act over the femtometer scale, and the schw. radius is smaller than that, the particle would certainly be able to get within strong range. And the strong force of 1kg worth of mass acting on an atom would have to be absolutely astronomical.
A second thought would be what would happen if the black hole collides with the particle. Assuming the event horizon can't envelop the whole particle, and the particle is indivisible (unlike stars, gases, planets, and other macroscopic objects), what happens? Do we have a particle with a hole in it, a particle that goes completely into the hole, or do they not interact?
Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
Everyone is harping on the mini black holes, which most evidence seems to suggest won't be a problem (as high energy cosmic rays do the same thing all the time), but I'm more concerned about the Bose Supernova.
Has anyone ever done an experiment by putting a powerful, rapidly switching magnetic field next to a bit of Bose-Einstein condensate to see if it, I don't know, annihilates the city the experiment is carried out in? Better to lose a city than have an Asia size crater where Europe used to be.
It's a weapon of mass destruction! Invade now Obama!!!
Ask Dr Hawkings. Or just look it up. The math is amazingly simple even for you. No one needs to prove everything they say and all this "citation needed" stuff is no different than "Frist Psot" or the other lame parrot shit I read here every day.
As a physicist, this whole thing has been an embarrassing reminder of just how bad physicists are at public relations...
Take heart, your peers in climatology and meteorology haven't been able to convince the US that global warming is real, in spite of the fact that several key politicians picked up the cause.
If being unable to convince people that a black hole *won't* happen is the worst you've done, count your blessings.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Each black hole is the remnant of what was once a locus of intelligent life.
In the year 2062, a galaxy-wide war results in the union of all planets under the rule of the Red Star of the Solar Federation. The world is controlled by the Priests of the Temples of Syrinx, who determine the content of all reading matter, songs, pictures - every facet of life during the year 2112 ("The Temples of Syrinx").
specifically X-rays, in vast quantities. So don't sit there and say there's no problem if the LHC does create black holes.
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
Got any proof to back that up?
Why? "If you dial 911 from your phone, the world will end." You can't prove me wrong without doing it and saying "see." There are no tests short of doing it. At most, you could examine the phone lines, the phone company, and all that, but how do you *know* there isn't a bomb wired to it somewhere you missed? The black holes can't destroy the earth because they are too small to even destroy an atom. And if they could destroy atoms, it would take longer than the sun's life to absorb all of the atoms on Earth. So, whether they last picoseconds, hours, days, or millenia, the result is the same.
Learn to love Alaska
I did some calculations and I think the worst that will happen is that the crew operating the LHC find themselves in a ditch on the side of the New Jersey turnpike.
Everyone knows we have until 12/21/2012 until the world ends.
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
Is there any chance that this whole debate could be sucked into the created black hole? The discussion seems to keep popping up every few weeks and there's never any new details. Perhaps the next update will cover how the scientists involved walked to their car that morning.
So, I'm no scientist, nor do I play one on TV, but, I recall Carl Sagan saying many years ago that a black hole bends both space, and time. So if the black hole only lasts a couple of minutes, and the time is bent, then how long does the minute last? If it makes time move more quickly, then I'm moving my cube to the LHC.
Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability: without Availability the other two are assured, as is Bankruptcy.
that pretty much sums up a lot of science these days...
I was listening to a scientist on TV discussing this black hole worry. He said that the same thing which the LHC will be doing inside its wonderous mechanisms is done billions of times every second, and at much higher power, by Cosmic Rays colliding with the atmosphere.
People have this amazing misunderstanding of black holes generated by Hollywood. If you take the moon, and crush it into a black hole, it will still follow the same orbital path, and have the same effect on the tides as it does currently. It will just occupy a much smaller space. Its event horizon with be incredibly small, and the amount of mass that would be added to annually would be about the same as it gains now through occasional collisions of small objects in space (i.e.,just about 0)
Since they will not have immense mass to apply to the particles, they will have to apply truly immense amounts of energy (E=mc^2). Should they actually achieve a 'black hole', it will have the same amount of gravitational attraction as it did before.
I think I will spend my time worrying about more likely problems, like cholesterol and cancer.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
As long as this experiment is conducted at the Black Mesa Research Facility, I can't see any problems occurring. Researcxh s
In this paper we present the results of our analysis of the growth and decay of black holes possibly produced at the Large Hadron Collider, based on our previous study of black holes in the context of the warped brane-world scenario. The black hole mass accretion and decay is obtained as a function of time, and the maximum black hole mass is obtained as a function of a critical mass parameter. The latter occurs in our expression for the luminosity and is related to the size of extra-dimensional corrections to Newtonâ(TM)s law of gravitation. Based on this analysis, we argue against the possibility of catastrophic black hole growth at the LHC.
Notice that this whole analysis is based on a warped brane-world calculation. In this calculation, it is assumed that there exists a 5th dimension in which gravity can act. We currently have no (physical) indication that there are any more dimensions than the ones we can perceive in every day life. This is really a very academic paper and subject. Unfortunately, many laymen think they are qualified to comment on the physics involved in these calculations.
It is a harsh reminder to all physicists that we suck at PR work.
In conclusion, I applaud you for reading the preprint and I support your statement:
Go back to worrying about your 401Ks.
How come everyone keeps talking about the numbers when no one has even observed a real black hole? It's a black hole - just because we've observed its behavior on a cosmic scale doesn't mean we know anything about how one will behave in this instance. We don't even understand the nature of space-time that would cause an object like a black hole to form.
If these potentially small black holes can't grow big then how big were the REALLY, REALLY BIG black holes when they first came into existence? What determines how big a black hold can grow?
Hopefully they turn it on before US taxes are due
I thought a lot of these small 'forces' were caused by exchanges of small amounts of sub-atomic particles between the not-so-sub-atomic particles.
whether or not my reasoning is correct, would the strong force/etc be 'sucked' in by the gravitational collapse and leave it a moot point?
someone with more info of the subject please point me in the right direction.
I'm amazed no one made a remark about "another world"... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_World_(video_game)
One fact that amuses me is that people are discussing black holes as a proven physics concept.
As far as I know (I have Ph.D. in physics) black holes are pure theoretical guess which does not have mathematical description (please do not refer to Hawking radiation etc - assumptions in his paper are pretty arbitrary, such as transition from background state of one space-time to background state of completely different space-time, and it takes forever for radiation to reach observer, if it where to exist.)
Keep in mind that there is no theory of gravity (there is Einstein theory of classical gravity, but we all know that the world around as is quantum).
All papers about black holes should start with "If black holes were to exist ...".
The same Einstein equation which give black hole solution also have "white hole" solution, and rarely you see mentioning of it. Why? Because we can not explain it.
The problem with abundance of this kind of papers is that scientific financing is approved by non-experts, so in last few decades science more and more tends to be of speculative character, like discovering water in space explorations, black holes, superstrings at al.
The main thing to keep in mind is, cosmic rays have energies vastly higher than the LHC. If the LHC could produce black holes, then there would be black holes floating around everywhere.
Maybe there are quantum black holes floating around everywhere. Wouldn't they be so small that interactions with other matter would be exceedingly rare? If the radius was equal to or less than the Planck length how could we ever detect them, aside from their gravity? (Of which we do seem to have a surplus.)
All we really have proof of from cosmic rays is that whether black holes are being created or not, they are not dangerous to us.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Don't worry, I've already read this story. We're perfectly safe from the artificial black holes as long as someone is already working on a time machine.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Even a mathematical "impossibility" is possible. It's highly improbable though. If you're not comfortable with that type of reassurance, you're living in the wrong universe.
Did anyone actually read the conclusions?
"As shown in the previous Section, in particular in Tables
Iâ"III, the maximum black hole mass never reaches
catastrophic size before leaving the Earth. The black hole mass remains at microscopic values for a wide range of acceptable
initial conditions and for a wide range of critical
masses, Mc. Indeed, in order for the black holes created
at the LHC to grow at all, the critical mass should be
Mc > 10^5 kg."
Last I checked, 14TeV in the center of mass frame is not sufficient to create a 10^5 kg patricle.
Correction: The Earth would just orbit the Sun, and if any swallowing would be done it would be the Earth that got to swallow.
Please don't tell my wife, last thing I need on a Friday is to be beaten by a Black Hole.
She'd be all like "I heard that the large hardon collider can pound a black hole for minutes, maybe you could work up your stamina like that?"
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
It's like the odds of a black man becoming President of the United States.
I thought a lot of these small 'forces' were caused by exchanges of small amounts of sub-atomic particles between the not-so-sub-atomic particles.
whether or not my reasoning is correct, would the strong force/etc be 'sucked' in by the gravitational collapse and leave it a moot point?
someone with more info of the subject please point me in the right direction.
That assumes that forces are mediated by wave/particles. If that is true, then I would expect no force interaction between black holes and the target (because the mediating particles can't escape). Obviously this doesn't hold for gravity ("gravitons"), since a black hole still exerts gravity on the target outside the event horizon. I would conclude electroweak and strong forces are effected similarly, but the scales normally seen with black holes reduces their effect to infinitesimal.
I'm not going to get into the possibilities of these mediating particles behaving according to quantum effects and somehow effecting "action at a distance".
Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
The Romulans power their ships with "artificial" black holes. Could we magnetically contain one of these little guys and see what can be done with it if they last that long?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
All of this ignores the possibility of degeneracy pressures, since if the electroweak forces do apply, they could potentially repel the target from the black hole before it gets close enough to be captured.
Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
Elementary particles are point-like. The question is, with what probability (per time) will objects find themselves within the Shwarzchild radius. No danger of particles with a bite taken out of them (unless the particles weren't actually elementary, a serious possibility).
Your issue of the strong force interacting with the black holes is fascinating though. And significantly more disturbing than my original analysis. Provided the black hole didn't have positive charge (which is as likely as not), the black hole would quickly bind to the nucleus of some atom.
Once this happened, remember that the strong force acts like a rubber band, force increasing with distance. So we don't expect the strong force to induce intra-Shwarzchild distances (so, the black hole still won't be able to suck up matter).
If the black hole were negatively charged (and of course much heavier than normal atomic nuclei), we expect the nuclei to begin orbiting the black hole due to electric interactions (analogous to electrons orbiting atomic nuclei). This radius is on the order of the Bohr radius (adjusted for atomic nuclei masses):
a_aroundblackhole = \hbar e^2/ (m_nucleus c\alpha q_nucleus q_blackhole) = 1.1x10^(-8) radii of nucleus
where I've used generous values of an object with a charge of 10^5e, interacting with some very heavy 250au nuclei with 100 protons. Even this value is tiny compared to the size of the nucleus. Also, its pretty unreasonable to expect a charge of 100,000 electrons from the particle collision (just a gut feeling here, I am not into beam physics).
I wouldn't worry. This really is chicken-little fear-mongering.
Cosmic rays more energetic than anything the LHC will produce have been hitting Earth every day for four billion years. We have not collapsed into a black hole. QED.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
Thanks for that comment. I've been wondering (with my limited understanding of physics) how creating a black hole was possible in this context. I understand that they're likely to create some amazingly dense matter... but I thought the gravity of a black hole was a feature of its mass as much as its density. What gravitational pull can a handful of particles have no matter how dense they are?
To my understanding, black holes aren't magical rips in the space-time continuum, they're just amazingly dense collections of huge quantities of matter. To make one, you need an enormous amount of matter, which the LHC does not have. There's no way I can see that we could jump-start a black hole formation here on earth.
But if I'm completely misunderstanding, let me know!
Cheers.
This situation was posited in David Brin's novel Earth and and he does present a compelling case for some concern. In that book a micro black hole was unknowingly created and it was able to become self-sustaining when it sunk into the Earth's core. It remained there for some time undetected until it accumulated enough mass to cause anomalous earthquakes and volcanism to crop up. This is a possible scenario for LHC too if the holes don't evaporate as expected.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Maybe creating little short lived black holes is not such a good idea given the penalty for failure. Bleeding edge experiments can and do go wrong:Demon Core.
And how does one stop a microscopic Black whole that suck up everything it touches?
What happens if this dot were to fall through the metal of the LHC, dissolving and incorporating all until it hits dirt. Slowly at first eating it's way to the core, where it will just continue to absorb all matter till there is nothing more.
Eventually nothing will be left of the Earth but an almost invisible pinpoint that is emitting Hawking radiation.
I am sure this will really perplex some future alien cosmologists who would have a hard time to explain how a black hole could exist where a planet would be expected.
All traces of life and civilization will be gone other then some distant radio signals and a few scraps of odd metal left on the moon and mars and the voyager probes will be all there is left to mark our very existence.
I guess we will not have to worry about Global Warming then after all.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
Just enough time to toss Tom Cruise in!
I guess we can say this, now that Obama's president. How the times have changed!
You could theorize that every black hole in the universe is evidence of a former alien race.
When talking about the destruction of our planet I want to hear more "Will not" VS "Should not" tyvm.
More proof than what? Who the hell wrote this article? Bush's scientific advisor? The proof you need requires the LHC to work and produce a Black hole that will decay faster than it can grow.
Have you ever heard of the scientific process? Geeez, who was the moron that wrote the article?
It's similar to what I've said before it's a non issue. Simple physics, the black hole's gravitational pull is equal to the matter involved in it's creation. It's not magic folks. Yes they can get bigger the more they consume but they are also limited to what they can by the event horizon. It's like trying to shove an elephant through a keyhole. I wouldn't recommend firing a stream of matter at it for the next ten thousand years otherwise the odds of it becoming dangerous are very slim.
All well and good, but unfortunately the graph on the web site is truncated. Here is the real version: http://www.skytopia.com/stuff/graph.png
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
But shouldn't we require better assurance than that?
NO! There are no assurances in life, period. There are some things that, within the narrow realm of our understanding of the universe and how space-time works, are 99.99999% probable, but we should not stop investigating something because we are unsure of an outcome. There is little, if any, real evidence to suggest that the LHC could cause a black hole that would swallow the Earth and the rest of our solar system. There is a probability that the energies being created by smashing particles in the LHC could create momentary or even (while the particle streams are still focused and colliding) sustained event horizons, but as soon as the energy is taken away the system would return to equilibrium; thermodynamics teaches us this. Black holes sustain themselves because their mass accelerates matter toward them eventually reaching velocities near the speed of light. In order to create a self-sustaining black hole you would need to feed it a lot of matter traveling at high velocities for a long time (eons with a lowly particle accelerator).
Let's stop worrying about what might happen and see what doors we can unlock. Heck, the Manhattan Project folks were worried that the Trinity bomb might ignite the atmosphere and turn the planet into a charred cinder. It was possible based on what they understood about the universe at the time. Didn't happen, though.
Scherner effect
an effect discovered by Dr Ernst Scherner just before his death at the LHC during the creation of the Earth's first (and last) Black Hole, In which he demonstrated mathematically that the absorption of the Earth by an atom sized event horizon was not only possible but inevitable given quantum bias effects caused by the imbalance in the quantum foam at relativistic speeds in an high intensity magnetic field caused by the holes "sheering wake" (see doomsday weapons/banned)
( for further details of the "LHC" see extinct races/human/epic fail)
Encyclopedia Centauri vol 32 page 1543
The evidence that the LHC is safe comes from experimental observation: no planet or star has disappeared due to cosmic ray bombardment. The possibility that BHs can last for minutes is a theoretical possibility. If the theory is correct it must agree with the experimental data. Hence either the assumptions upon which the theory is based are wrong or having a black hole lifetime of several minutes is still not enough time for it to grow.
Why worry if a black hole eats the planet? It will kill everyone and no one will be around to care.
I would trust your assertion more fully if you knew how to spell 'indefinitely'.
"Black Holes" starring Brock Collider
How much could one of these things weigh when it's created? It's a few fundamental particles - so let's guess it weighs as much as a typical atom. So how much gravity does it have? Almost none - right? So how big is its event horizon? Well, gravity is an inverse square law so if it's a true singularity then it WILL have an event horizon - but it'll be INSANELY small...I mean - much MUCH smaller than an atomic nucleus. So how much can it eat? Well in order to eat another particle - that particle has to get within the event horizon (or at least bloody close to it). But recall that if the nucleus of an atom (which we should agree is bigger than the event horizon) is the size of a marble - an atom is the size of a small city. So what are the odds of the nucleus of an atom getting within the event horizon? It's something like the odds of tossing a marble into a city somewhere completely at random - and having it hit another marble that's at the center of the city. This is VERY unlikely - and even if it happens, the black hole still only weighs as much as (now) two atoms...so it's now a little bit bigger than a marble (maybe). It simply can't get close enough to enough other particles to eat many of them before it vaporizes (which Hawkings says will happen in a small fraction of a second).
So don't sweat it...it's not a problem.
In order for a black hole to be of any real danger it would have to gain enough mass for its gravity to overcome the radiation pressure of in falling matter and virtual particle decay. This means it would have to have at least the mass of Mt. Everest to have any chance of growing.
That being said, the longer life does have some interesting applications. One could for example, try to create one of these with an electrical charge. This can be done by using charged particles to create it or forcing such a particle into the black hole. Once done one could then control it with magnetic fields. You could use the particle to create pseudo matter with a positively charged black hole as nucleus and an orbiting electron. If one could force a atom laser to focus on a single point in the Event Horizon, it should be able to overcome the ambient radiation pressure allowing it to be grown and maintained. This makes for an interesting energy source or weapon. For example, pump one up to quite a larger size and then let it rapidly decay. This would produce an immense amount of energy. This energy contained would be useful for work, exposed it would be deadly. One could create many gravitic effects and even experiment with worm hole physics. All in all quite interesting.
playing devils advocate...
When I hear about scientists intense desire to see results from the LHC, I can't help seeing how driven the scientists are to achieve their goal. This opens up the question, why are they so driven. While their desire to learn is obviously a part of their drive, an inescapable fact is, if they succeed in their discoveries, there is also the huge opportunity for personal gain. (Noble prizes etc..) That creates a inescapable bias in their thinking towards wanting to do these experiments, before their competitors can take their prized goal from them.
Even your own comments also highlight this same desire and personal gain goals. You like a lot of us want to be free to carry out the research you want to do, but you are held back by the goals of others and their need for you to justify the work you wish to do. e.g.
"As a scientist, I'm not entitled to a lab, or funding, or students. I have to ask the government for the ability to do research and their permission to do the research I'd like to do (they regularly check on what I'm doing). If there's no government agency (or private company) that wants to fund me to do what I'd like, I have to do what they want me to do to pay the bills. Occasionally, you can slip some research in that's not supported, but you're not going to get something like the LHC without the government wanting it to happen."
Many of us want to be free to carry out the research we wish to do. I can strongly relate to that, but I can't help playing devils advocate. Any bias towards personal gain creates an inescapable bias in peoples thinking. (Its easy to assume noble thinking on the part of scientists, but scientists are still humans and biased thinking is still possible even amongst the best scientists).
For example, here's a simple thought experiment. Imagine telling all the scientists on the LHC the project is canceled. Imagine their reaction. They would be utterly devastated and totally incensed at even the suggestion of canceling the LHC. There is almost no way to cancel the LHC. It shows just how strong their desire is to carry on with their experiments
Now combine this intense drive with the way paradigms have been fought over in science through the centuries. I find it very interesting how the smartest minds of a generation argue over the truth. It can take decades to over turn some paradigms, but thats not my point. My point is, before the paradigm shift, the majority of people deeply believed that their explanation of the world around us was correct to the best of their abilities. Sure they were willing to consider amendments to their ideas, but most strongly resist a paradigm shift, until the weight of evidence overwhelms their current perception.
Now combine this with the reasoning behind why we need the LHC. We have theories of how it should work, but we don't know *for certain*. We can argue to the best of our abilities that our explanations of the world around us conforms to our current theories, but we simple do not know for sure. If we did know for sure, there would be no point in constructing the LHC.
With the current biased thinking around the LHC, even if there was something dangerous to be found in the LHC, the current thinking shown by a lot of scientists (certainly the majority) will be very unwilling to accept anything other than absolute proof its dangerous. By the time we have absolute proof, its too late. With most experiments in history, if they go wrong, then worst case, we end up with some dead people, but then everyone else learns from their mistakes. With the LHC we don't have that luxury. If we make something dangerous in the LHC then we loose the planet. The LHC cannot operate by the same trial and error process of learning. (People dying during a mistake or unexpected event is effectively a process of learning by mistake).
Playing devils advocate, its very clear that even if something dangerous could be created in the LHC, the people behind it don't want to be stopped from running th
It's called my bank account and retirement savings.
shouldn't we require better assurance than that?
We spent 20 billion on something that is based on a failed model. How do we know that current calculations are correct? ;-)
We don't even know if the "particle physics" model is correct; in fact, we know that it is not correct. Particle Physics, like all models, has central assumptions and we haven't managed to explain them yet.
I've heard it said: "matter only behaves like particles when we're measuring it". We now have instrumentation that can measure things predicted by our model: predictions don't always come true. We learn from experience
As others have said many times, nature dramatically exceeds any test we've ever done on an almost daily basis. If microscopic black holes were going to gobble up the earth, it would have happened long ago, in fact, all the stars and planets in the universe would now be black holes. You may have noticed, this hasn't happened. ergo...
Think about it... the sun, 186,000 miles across reduces to a black hole, and the radius of the event horizon would be measured in mere dozens of miles. Now squish an atomic nucleus (even carrying the mass of all that acceleration), the resulting black hole and it's event horizon would vanish down to dimensions comparable to the Plank Length. At that dimension, the distance between any particles is beyond imagining. With a lifespan of even hours the best such an object could hope to do is gravitationally disrupt a few atomic nuclii.
This simply isn't a threat to anyone or anything.
I would trust your assertion more fully if you knew how to spell 'indefinitely'.
Dude, he's a physicist not an English major.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
You sound like a fellow who knows what the answer is going to be before he evefn starts the experiment or calculations. Putting aside your suggestions of murder, what basis do you have for your assertion that the energy of the LHC beam was "only 450 GeV at the time of the accident?"
It reminds me of the Tower of Babel were people wanted to build a tower so high that will reach God but it failed. Same here we are trying to find the thumbprint of God the Higgs particale and that may be our end if we are not careful.
Because I work at CERN, and that's the injection energy of the SPS. They had not started to ramp the magnetic fields in to get to higher energies. The planned first collisions were at 450 GeV (and ramp afterwards), which never happened.
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
I'm hoping they find a second magnetic monopole. The first one, I imagine, is still quite lonely. Sniff.
The doomsayers have grabbed onto this idea of horrible black holes, but the proof that these will even appear are from the same scientists that try to convince them that any black holes, in the unlikely case they will appear, will be harmless. "Assurance" seems to be a requirement directed at only one side of the fence while the other is free to do its unscientific fantasizing without any need to provide actual proof.
I mean after they have proven that the Earth will not be swallowed by a black hole when they perform the experiments, what next?
Prove that a dimensional gate will not open, letting in Yog-Sothoth from the great beyond.
Prove that the collision will not exterminate the (ultra-rare) unicorns.
Prove that the collider doesn't employ Goa'uld technology.
It never ends.
Meanwhile, said doomsayers carry mobile phones in their pockets even though it hasn't been proven that the radiation doesn't cause infertility and cancer. They drive cars even though the probability of getting killed that way is many orders of maginitude higher than the black hole forming hypothesis...
I found this online
"In 1974 Professor Hawking argued that due to quantum effects, primordial black holes created during the Big Bang could "evaporate" by a theoretical process now referred to as Hawking Radiation in which particles of matter would be emitted.
Under this theory, the smaller the size of the micro black hole, the faster the evaporation rate, resulting in a sudden burst of particles as the micro black hole suddenly explodes."
The real question is how much damage would an exploding black hole of this size actually do? My guess is not a whole lot, but enough to mangle the test lab pretty badly.
can we build a weapon out of it? Just kidding. I am sure this question is already examined....
If you throw a tennis ball, with a cross-sectional area smaller than a human, into a crowd of humans, there's pretty good chance one will get hit. And if that ball can pass through the human, then there are others that will be hit too.
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
I think we should start a lawsuit which should be settled just as the machine is turned on. Just as the end of the planet occurs, our bank accounts will grow. Hey, its a recession, we all need the money!!
All this worrying is SO silly. There are no black holes, it's just a theoretical construct to explain some observed phenomena, we have no proof that such objects even exists (in the form we hypothise). Now assuming that we can possibly create one in a small(by cosmo-scale) lab on Earth is more on the comical side than anything else. Stop this folly and move on to more experiments. cheers mrn
These are our first black holes, but based on unconfirmed new ideas in the last decade, we are certain of the outcome.
After the first nuclear tests, men were given the task of running into ground zero seconds after the explosion to make tests. They all died with the assurance that we understood nuclear physics.
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
Should??
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Some people here like to crave an assurance in death ..
is that easier to provide ? *big smile*
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
To make a big one of appreciable size, like the kind you can see with a telescope, you need astronomical amounts of matter.
However, mass and energy are the same fundamental quantity (ie E = mc^2). Let's take a look at collisions in the LHC and see how much mass we can get, shall we?
The *maximum* center of mass energy of each collision is 14 TeV. That's a lot for particle physics, but we'll soon see why that's actually really very little in macroscopic terms. Also, remember that the average collision in the LHC will be much less than this; the interactions will take place between quarks, not the protons themselves, so you can have 2 quarks interacting with much less than 14 TeV despite the two protons colliding at 14 TeV.
14 TeV = 1.6*10^-7 J
Oh, it turns out that's actually an insignificant amount of energy per collision. It takes 4 MILLION J to raise the temperature of a kg of water by 1 degree Celsius.
So how much mass could we theoretically have if we converted it all into a black hole? It would be about 10^-24 kg, giving it a Schwarzschild radius of approx 10^-51 meters. That is the LARGEST possible black hole that can be created. Let's even be extra generous and give it a 10^-45 m radius
The Planck Length is 10^-35 m. Below this length gravity effectively stops working. In other words, if two particles are closer than this distance then quantum physics takes over and gravity is so ineffective that it can be ignored. At this scale the other forces dominate, and normal gravitational effects do not apply.
Bottom line: We don't really know if we can even create black holes of that size, much less how they would work. If they work just like large scale black holes, then they're unable to "gobble up" more matter due to their insignificant size and eventually will evaporate.
Even if the rate of evaporation is completely wrong and they exist forever, they're too small to interact with matter through gravity! In other words, even if you directed protons AT THE BLACK HOLE, they would not interact with it, nor would new black holes interact with it! If something even came close to magically reaching its radius, which we've established is impossible due to the shortness of the planck length, it would be repelled by the black hole's doubly positive charge (as we all know, electromagnetism is frighteningly more powerful than gravity).
In summary, even if we made a black hole that lived forever, it would still mean nothing.
And back to the discussion of cosmic rays, let's say a black hole is created in the atmosphere with a considerable mass. Some have pointed out that it would still have a large momentum and fling out to space, but it would have to pass through the Earth first. If its interaction potential was truly high enough to matter, high enough to absorb more energy than it leaks, the Earth probably would have been destroyed. Even worse than that, we'd see a much higher rate of black hole development. Since collisions like this are downright common over billions of years, it is likely that all of the matter in the universe would be in black holes right now.
Much more likely is that advanced alien civilizations develop technology sufficient to destroy themselves through war, not through happenstance particle collisions that occur all the time naturally.
We know physics pretty darn well. Its the very fine details that we aren't sure about.
Wrong. We don't know much about physics. What we have is a good start. We're still doing experiments to confirm the basics which become not so basic the more we investigate.
Wake me when we have found a non-polluting power supply AND are actually using it on a planetary scale. We haven't even significantly traveled outside Earth's gravity yet. And no, probes and trips to the moon don't count, they are just a first step.
Humanity has dipped its toe in the pond, but can't yet swim.
the fact that 1) no one knows about LHC besides a few geeks, of which you and i are obviously one -euh .. two ???
2) whatever LHC might discover might be more important than whatever we already know ??? (really, destroying what we have so far wouldnt be SUCH a waste, tho i would like to see the cats in a safe place first ... they're just so ... divine)
3)how on earth could you possibly think that we can already summon the amount of energy necessary to create a fucking black , if you pardon my french, fucking hole ... it's supposed to be the center of the universe according to one of the smartest people on this dustball (correct me if i'm wrong) ...
4) let's just support them and see what happens, after all, can anyone predict the consequenses of what the mayans predict for 2012 ? scientiffically, i mean, really ... can you , but would you stop it ???
beware he who denies you access to information for in his mind, he already deems himself to be your master (SMAC-ish)
No, actually black holes can have any mass.
You probably know that the formula of the gravity pull of an object is proportional to m/r^2, r being the distance between the center of the object and the point where you measure the force, and m the mass of the object. This formula is valid only outside the body. Once inside, gravity start to decrease.
Now imagine that you could reduce the size of the object as much as you want. At some point, the gravity pull at the surface of the object will be so high that the escape velocity will reach the speed of light. This is true whatever the mass of the object is, because the limit of 1/r^2 as r approaches 0 if infinity. This radius is called the Schwarzschild radius.
In the LHC, it might be possible that by smashing particles together with huge energies, they would be compacted below the Schwarzschild radius, creating an extremely small black hole.
There is another theory, called the Hawking radiation, which says that black holes are not really black, but slightly evaporate, getting smaller over time.
The debate is to know which is the fastest, the speed at which the black holes evaporate, or the speed at which they "eat" matter and energy around them.
As you said these very small black holes would have very little gravity pull, and would encounter other particles only by chance. also, the Hawkings theory states that very small black holes dissipate very fast.
However everything about black holes is purely theoretical, and some people aren't quite content to test this against the fate of our planet :-)
Yes, but a crowd of humans is much more dense than a "crowd of atoms". Even the most dense materials look more like stars in a galaxy than humans in a crowd. Although, even that analogy is far too dense, especially near the center of a galaxy.
So imagine throwing a moon size object at a galaxy going about the speed of light. Will it hit a star? Maybe, but keep in mind that it is evaporating at a rate of one moon's volume a year. As you can see, it needs to hit a star within the first year. OK, lets say it hits something right away. Now it is two moons big (the star got compressed) and has two years to find it's next target, but that is hardly enough time to get to another star intentionally, let alone by chance.
As you can imagine, this object would evaporate long before it had any sort of stability accept in the rarest most unlikely case. Now realize that this analogy actually simulates something magnitudes more dense then the center of our planet and hawking radiation magnitudes smaller than in reality. Then you'll begin to understand what you're talking about.
There is a reason that in order to form a stable black hole in nature requires the collapse of a star so gigantic in size that we can hardy imagine the scale. It just takes that much material collapsing all at once. We don't have that much material on earth. We don't have that much material withing 10 light years of us.
The LHC simply is not going to create a world ending black hole. Period.
Because I work at CERN, and that's the injection energy of the SPS. They had not started to ramp the magnetic fields in to get to higher energies. The planned first collisions were at 450 GeV (and ramp afterwards), which never happened.
So...did someone at CERN tell you that the injector energy level was 450 GeV or are you just assuming that that's what it was since that was planned? Also, I would presume that measuring, monitoring, and controlling such a thing would be complex and subject to a lot of unexpected variations in the performance of the systems that might allow a variety of unplanned power fluxes in the early stages of testing so I don't find your blanket assurance that it was "XXX" to be comforting, especially considering that the system burned up so soon after startup.
This is actually new to me -- so thanks very much for posting it. I'll have to read up on the topic because it sounds incredible to me that if you compress a small amount of matter enough the escape velocity could increase to the point where it is significant, let alone increasing it all the way to the speed of light.
Of course, much of physics is incredible and yet well demonstrated.
Cheers.
Putting aside the discussion of real or imagined danger from the LHC, you ask why our smartest scientists are pressured (through grants etc.) to work on projects like these. Or if particle accelerators are necessary, perhaps all of this can be done in a distributed, low-tech manner.
In the 19th century, studies of the economy was called study of political economy (not study of economics). The decision to do these massive scientific projects like the LHC, or that are done within in NASA, or in a military sense. things like missile shields or the like - all of these things are done not for scientific reasons, but due to the economy part of political economy (and to a lesser extent, the political side of political economy). Or to say that again, they are not done primarily for scientific but for economic reasons. Our current economic system favors that the government spend money on centralized, high tech projects like this. It is why the US is building dozens of nuclear submaries it does not need, but does not have enough troops on the ground in Iraq or provide them with as much "armor" as they could use. It is why bridges to nowhere are built, and other expensive and unnecessary projects are done. Richard Nixon once shocked conservatives by stating his agreement with the phrase "We are all Keynesians now".
I'm not a physics expert, but I certainly have seen these white elephants pop up, everyone has. I'm sure every physicist knows the same thing you do, and has said so. Has your collective criticism done anything? No. Why? Because it is a problem within political economy, not with science or the scientific community. If you're interested in solving the problem, realize that charts and presentations and so forth showing how money is being wasted on big white elephant projects will help some, but will only go so far. You have to understand the relation of grants to the existing system of political economy, and then understand political economy, the problems in political economy, and how to properly deal with them, which goes beyond just charts and presentations. It takes effort to fix things on a one-off basis, and completely fixing all of the problems in the system would be a major, major effort, and would probably include a lot of political turmoil.
I think one thing instructive about American scientific progress in some instances was really helped by the Russians. Let me ask a question - when was NASA formed? The answer is July 1958. Now let me ask another question - when was Sputnik launched? The answer is October 1957. The newspapers up until the 1950s were full of stories of the superiority of the US economic system over the USSR's economic system. Even things like the A-bomb can be said to have been gotten through spying. However, when the USSR launched the first artificial satellite, it was a technical innovation, the first of the kind, so it couldn't be blamed on espionage and was inarguably proof of Russian superiority in this area. Within several months NASA formed and the US devoted a massive amount of money to technology. The educational system was re-done to create students with a better mathematical and scientific outlook. If one has met Russian IT people, as I have, you are probably quite often impressed with how sharp and well-educated many of them are. Anyhow, all of this is an example of how political economy pushed forward scientific development. Would we ever have spent the money to go to the moon if Sputnik was never launched? Probably not.
Isn't it obvious? All of Lehman Brothers assets got sucked up in a black hole created by the LHC!
Bumming around wikipedia i tried to pull some equations on how long a 1kg black hole would last, and came up with t = 3.21 * 10^-26 seconds. If it was travelling at the speed of light, it would travel 9.6 * 10^-18 metres, so it wouldn't even make it across the width of a nucleus.
I've obviously done something wrong, because physicists say they can last from seconds to an hour.
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
to check the figures... Oh wait, no, he managed to destroy three quarters of a solar system! Actually five sixth. Well it's not exact science ;)
http://www.gateworld.net/atlantis/s2/206.shtml
- Everyone knows that the Tralfalmadorians will destroy the universe, when they test their new rocket fuel...
.
- aqk
F U
I don't see anything to worry about in any outcome.
If these mini black holes are smaller than a proton, wouldn't a particle just get sucked onto the event horizon and cork it up the way a tennis ball gets sucked onto the end of a vacuum cleaner hose?
(For the thin-skinned hard science guys, I'm not being serious here, by the way.)
...However everything about black holes is purely theoretical,...
Indeed, there is no physical evidence that such things even exist in physical reality. They definitely exist in elegant mathematics, but since when MUST mathematics determine and lead reality, rather that describe it?
All theory is gray
Why would you bet "for" the black hole eating the world? How would you collect?
better assurance
Science is not politics or religion. It's not about what you believe, it's about what can be proven. Believing a proof's validity is not a religious issue, it's not about believing it or not, it's about having (or not having) the necessary knowledge to recognize its validity (or invalidity). Ignorant folks spreading "I don't believe them" lines is nothing but a miserable try to spread hysteria.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Still... i advise you, expect unforseen consequences.
The devil tends to be in the details...
Why the hell don't they just do it already. If nothing bad happens everything will be fine. If something bad happens there is a good chance we won't be around long enough to realize they screwed up. Not exactly win-win but hell, I like a good gamble.
Oh really.
We do not yet understand the laws of what we are yet to uncover. I believe the reason for doing is the reason for staying our hand. Perhaps not in most cases, but the sheer increase in energies being used in such powerful basic building blocks of the known universe, causes me to wonder if we have to be more than carefull with this one. And as stated so much here, the fact that micro black holes are not unexpected is disconcerting... Last time I checked, no one had sipped a cocktail relaxing on the beach as the event horizon set.
Does society need these experiments done?
When the experiment has critical calculations on critical risks so wrong (what was the factor?) wouldn't the need for review and recalculations of all systems and therefore need to re-prove the safety assertion they have made? And the micro black hole dilemma, does anyone know all the laws governing black holes?
Is it at all possible, that this experiment might suffer from overzealous and arrogant leadership, with the added momentum of so many institutions and individuals with minds that can be almost called giddy and compulsive in there thirst for knowledge... and patents.
The time dilation from moving at relativistic speeds makes it live longer. Just like in science fiction books -- people traveling from star to star at relativistic speeds can live for thousands of years (but it still feels like the normal amount of time to them).
That TV show says the Earth is type 13 planet soon to be destroyed by scientist searching for high-boson particle. They will create a blackhole that will suck the planet down to the size of a pea. They fly around in a giant penis bug
The strength of gravity compared to the strong and weak forces is almost nil at subatomic scales. It's near meaningless.
the LHC can create a blackhole is if the scientists divide by zero.
http://shhac.info/x/b/divide_by_zero.jpg
Didn't they find a way to produce collisions at much higher energies using a piece of desktop equipment that would make the cost and time spent building the LHC a huge waste of money given that there is now a way to do it that is an order of magnitude cheaper and works just as well if not better.
I wish I had the link but don't have time to google it right now, plus if the /. crowd can't find it based on the information given, I know I can't :).
they're just amazingly dense collections of huge quantities of matter
Nope. A black hole is simply any kind of mass compressed until the particles collapse into a size smaller than the event horizon of that mass.
The actual amount of mass is of no consequence.
What gravitational pull can a handful of particles have no matter how dense they are?
This is also why such a black hole would be harmless. If you create a black hole with the mass of two protons, it will have the gravitational pull of two protons.
If it absorbs another proton, it will have the gravitational pull of three protons.
A black hole of this mass would be very, very tiny, and it would need to actually get close enough to a particle to start interact with it. On these scales, the distance between atoms is huge and so is the distance between the nucleus and electrons, so this would be a rather rare event.
Second, a proton here and an electron there every once in a while, when it gets close enouch, would increase the mass of the hole very little.
How long would it take for a 1 microgram hole to reach 2 microgram, even if you add a whole atom every second or so?
This is also disregarding the possible existence of Hawking radiation, which makes black holes loose mass and which would probably make a small black hole lose mass faster than it can absorb it.
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
Other topic of interest: Strange Quark Nuggets
That's the point. The black hole would have to bind with some other force. And the Shwartschild radius is so ridiculously small that nothing else is going to cause that much localization of another particle.
Suppose that you take a car, and try to measure its surface gravity. It's going to be absurdly small. The reason for this is that there's a limit to how close you can get to the car's total massenergy. If you get really close to an atom in the front bumper, you're still several feet away from the atoms in the rear bumper. Move closer to the rear of the car, and you move further away from the front. You can think of the car as a distributed fuzzy cloud of massenergy, with an effective lower limit to the average proximity that you can achieve to its total mass.
Now squash the car into a 1cm cube. You can now get to about a ~1cm average distance of the total mass, which wasn't possible before. The surface gravitational field intensity is now larger for the same amount of mass. You have the same number of fieldlines, but squashed into a smaller region.
Now crush the 1cm cube into a half-centimetre cube. It has the same number of gravitational fluxlines as before, but the new cube has one quarter of the earlier surface area, so the flux density exiting that surface is four times greater. Each time you half the dimensions, the surface flux density quadruples. Squash it all the way down to a dimensionless point, and the surface gravitational field intensity is infinite. At some distance around that point, there'll be a critical radius where the surface gravitation (compared to the background) is just strong enough to stop light, and that's your event horizon radius. Under current theory, you've then got yourself a "micro" black hole.
This doesn't require the massenergy to be really compacted all the way to a dimensionless a point, just to less than the critical radius.
If you want to create an event-horizon-bounded region, it certainly helps if you have a huge amount of matter, but its not entirely necessary.
Eric Baird
Unstable heavy isotopes were decaying within the earth quintntzillions of times a second without our seeing any explosions, and the expected concentration of heavy metals at the Earth's core somehow resisted the urge to blow the planet apart.
This didn't mean that it was "proved" that an A-bomb mechanism was harmless and couldn't possibly explode. It just meant that in order to turn a reasonably common effect (nuclear decay) into something with potentially catastrophic consequences, we needed to create a special, artificial, orderly convergence of circumstances that wouldn't normally happen by itself in Nature, namely,
Does this combination of features sound at all familiar? :)
Eric Baird
The idea of the "immortal" black hole wasn't dreamed up by conspiracy theorists or bad science fiction authors, it was developed and taught as mathematically proven fact in university physics courses. Back in the 1960's one of the surest things in physics was supposed to be that black holes had precisely zero radiation. This is part of why, when Hawking gave his first lecture on Hawking radiation, a well-known author of a book on black holes pointedly stood up and walked out of the lecture declaring that Stephen Hawking was talking complete rubbish.
So you can't really complain when the public feel a bit confused and reckon that they're receiving mixed messages ... because they are. The physics community assured them that a particular thing was mathematically proven beyond doubt to be absolutely impossible, with 100% certainty, and then they heard about the LHC, and then they were assured that LHC was safe because that same thing was known to be inevitable, with near 100% certainty.
You can't blame them for comparing the two conflicting stories and deciding that perhaps some of these "facts" about theoretical physics need to be taken with a grain of salt.
I suppose that you could blame the public for being insufficiently up-to-date with current scientific knowledge ... but in my experience, most of the physicists I was coming across online in the in the 1990's didn't understand Hawking radiation either, and some refused to believe that what they'd been taught in uni as fact was now not considered correct by the top guys. I seemed to spend a lot of my time online in the 1990s trying to persuade mainstream physics people to please forget about what they'd been taught at uni and to check the current literature to see how many of the old "facts" had changed. Some of these guys were actually teaching university physics in major institutions.
So it's quite rational for the public to be sceptical about LHC safety assurances. Its entirely logical for them to ask: You guys were completely wrong before ... how do we know that you're not completely wrong again now? It's also reasonable for them to note that LHC scientists may have a incentive to believe that the LHC is perfectly safe whether it is or not - that's just human nature. Experts who are heavily invested in a process sometimes have the ability to convince themselves that everything is fine even when a disaster has started to obviously unfold.
Remember, in the last few years, authority-figures assured the public that Iraq had an active WMD programme, that the invasion of Iraq would be straightforward, and that the US economy was just fine.
When the public choose to be sceptical about expert assurances based on their assessment of the experts' "need to believe", then that scepticism isn't always irrational.
Eric Baird
Small black holes are far less dangerous than made out to be.
... and what I don't understand is where any danger is supposed to come from? Black holes do not create matter, they condense it. So if the LHC collides two protons and forms a mini-mini-mini black hole, this black hole would still have the truly monstrous gravitational field of ... two protons! Wow! And before it could start swallowing other particles, those particles would still have to overcome the electric charge of the black hole, so protons and atomic nuclei (being positively charged) are pretty much out of the question, as the charge is still 2e and the resulting repulsive force will be much stronger than gravity (at least at normal "atomic" distances). Or am I wrong?
I wonder: Would this even be distinguishable from a regular Helium nucleus? Could it form an atom of "black holium" with two electrons orbiting a nucleus made of two protons forming a black hole?
The paper in question states the chances of a black hole forming are more remote than yours in getting it on with Angelina Jolie, and that's after having stalked her for years and being slapped with a restraining order preventing you from even entering the country she resides in. For a black hole to form, everything would have to be just right, meaning all the variables would have to exist in a state that just doesn't happen in nature. All the hullaballo is over what amounts to a science fiction story presented as a research paper (it's called theoretical physics: as in, "if all this stuff were true, this would happen! But it isn't").
If you were to create a black hole on earth, that for some reason didn't evaporate almost instantly, then, yes it could fall to the enter of the earth. It wouldn't likely leave any holes though, or even pick up mass. Because the amount of energy we could put into it would be so minuscule that it would probably pass right through atoms without colliding with a electron. Also, it would fall very slowly, more like a slowly drifitng mote of air. Gravity acts proportional to mass and inversely by distance, so something that small wouldn't have much mass to draw to the center of the earth, even at the incredible density of a black hole.
A black hole isn't a particular mass or size, its just a ratio of density. And that number is huge. Really huge. From the wikipedia entry on 'Schwarzschild radius': 'A mass similar to Mount Everest has a Schwarzschild radius smaller than a nanometre.'
We aren't working with large masses at the LHC, but small masses imbued with large amounts of kinetic energy, and as I pointed out (e=mc^2), mass has a huge amount of energy in it. So, loosly put, creating a black hole a nanometer in size might take the equivalent energy as produced by hydrogen bomb THE SIZE OF FREAKIN' EVEREST going off. I felt the need to capitolize that last sentence, because I thought it would look cooler to people starting to get bored reading this.
A hydrogen bomb that detonated that much fuel would ignite the atmosphere, instantly kill half of life on earth with hard radiation, and fragment a good portion of the planet, killing the rest off. So, no, we really don't have to worry much about
But if you really want to fret about it, here s the upside: If we created a Black hole on the earth's surface that managed to 'chain react' with the rest of the earth's mass, it would likely do so in such a rapid fashion, that you wouldn't even know what killed you. You would just get instantly crushed into quantum foam. Beats dying of cancer any day...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Well if we know physics that well then there is absolutely no reason to turn the bugger on then eh? Black holes should not be treated like a new form of toxic waste.