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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?"
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
>> proud motherland of the apes, chimpanzees, macaques, baboons
Not to mention humans.
PS Crack a dictionary, read the definition of "niggle." But then again a mind that operates at your level is easily distracted by shiny objects and rhyming words, I suppose.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
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...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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
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.
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...
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.
The parent post is also a fine example of making grand claims about advanced science without providing a single reference.
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
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.
I'm aware of the tongue and cheek nature of this post, but I'm also not a theoretical physicist, so can someone tell me if the current body of knowledge indicates any way to contain a black hole? In other words, it's impossible to put a charge on a black hole, right?
In theory.
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."
Charge is maintained. You can't destroy a negative without also destroying an equal positive.
Therefore if you shoot a lot of electrons into the black hole it will develop a charge and the charge can be manipulated.
After it has a charge you just need to shoot equal positive and negative charges
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
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
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.
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!
It's like the odds of a black man becoming President of the United States.
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.
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...
Isn't it obvious? All of Lehman Brothers assets got sucked up in a black hole created by the LHC!