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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
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.
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?
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.
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?
Finally, we may have resolved the Fermi Paradox.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
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 ...
Everyone wins a free trip to France.
It's the ice-9 strangelets that have me worried.
Life would be easier if I had the source code.
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...
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.
In theory.
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."
Well, ok, since you said so, I just did.
Aw, crap.
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
Thank goodness we built the LHC to provide science fiction authors another MacGuffin.
It's like the odds of a black man becoming President of the United States.
I was talking about RHIC fireballs.
When the gold nuclei smash into each other they are broken down into particles called quarks and gluons.
These form a ball of plasma about 300 times hotter than the surface of the Sun. This fireball, which lasts just 10 million, billion, billionths of a second, can be detected because it absorbs jets of particles produced by the beam collisions.
But Nastase, of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, says there is something unusual about it.
Ten times as many jets were being absorbed by the fireball as were predicted by calculations.
I was interpreting that to mean a black hole has a larger collective cross-sectional area than if the mass that made it up weren't a black hole. I guess it doesn't mean what I thought it did.