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Micro-Black Holes Make Poor Planet Killers
astroengine writes "Physicists are getting excited about the possibility of micro-black holes (MBH) being produced by the LHC and an international group of researchers have done the math to see what kind of impact they could have on the Earth. Unfortunately, if you're a megalomaniac looking for your next globe-eating weapon, you can scrub MBHs off your WMD list. If a speedy MBH is produced, flying through our planet, it will only have a few seconds to accrete the mass of a few atoms. It would then be lost to space where it will evaporate. If a slow MBH is produced, dropping into the Earth where it sits for a few billion years, the results are even more boring."
I guess I know what kind of girl to look for now ;)
U+F8FF
Sorry, but I really feel the need to be afraid of something irrational.
Or it destroys the whole planet!!!!111!!11!!1!!
All your 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 are belong to us
Actually it's freshman-level physics. Calculating how quickly a micro-black-hole would accumulate mass strikes me as a great undergrad tutorial question.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Ironically, it sucks to be them :)
Summation 2
Sadly however, people will read this article and will still freak out about how the LHC is going to doom us all.
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
How much red matter does the LHC use anyway?
Ah, the fear of the unknown. Yes, a classic. "I don't understand it, and I don't believe that they do either".
I've got news for you; this is as good (or should i say precise) model of these things as you are going to get right now. It's the cutting edge of our understanding of how MBHs work, and _that_ understanding in turn depends on a quite large, quite solid foundation of math and physics.
So please, this isn't speculation, it's SCIENCE.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
And where exactly does the MBH evaporate to? Or is that all part of the mystery?
I'm sure there's somebody on /. who can answer this:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought to be a black hole you had to be 2 things.
1. a singularity
2. heavy/massive enough to stop anything from escaping
If you've got a singularity (worst case in our example) that's the mass of the earth, how's that supposed to stop any light/matter/etc escaping? It's not massive enough!
or am I missing something.
Also, please excuse my lack of correct terminology. IANAAP
this post is now diamonds!
But http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_(novel) was such a good book, why must MBH be so boring in reality?
This is completely safe. We know what's going to happen, that's why we're building these expensive machines to perform experiments. (Yes, I know that doing something catastrophic with the LHC is very very unlikely, but it's an experiment after all. It's not like scientists have never fucked up before, is it?)
Well, the key isn't just mass, but also radius. Gravity (I'll go newtonian, just because I'm lazy) increased linearly with mass, but decreases with the square of the radius. So for example, if you packed something the mass of Earth in just half the size of Earth, the gravity on the surface would be 4 times that of Earth. Squeeze it into a quarter of the size of Earth and get 16 times the gravity on the surface. Squeeze it small enough and you have a black hole.
If you do the proper maths, the Schwarzschild radius of a black hole with the mass of Earth is about 9mm.
Which really means, don't think something that will suck matter and bend light spectacularly all the way to Alpha Centauri. It means that if light happens to go within 9mm of that singularity, it ain't coming out. But farther away, it's still a body with the mass of Earth. The moon's orbit will still have the same radius for example.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I don't doubt the science behind the LHC or the scenarios presented. But I wonder if it is possible to make a device (probaby insanely expensive and massive like the LHC) whereby the MHB could be accurately force fed like a veal calf untill it hit a critical point (tons - ktons - Mtons) of mass and would be a worthy earth destroyer. Nuclear weapons just destroy a little area and make the world far less habitable. A good size black hole could
I heard this months ago on /. , it's hardly news to those who had actually been following things.
If there was any serious cause for concern, this wouldn't be going ahead. I doubt every scientist working on the project is also desiring to commit suicide/genocide/planetacide/whatever.
which is totally what she said
"Calculating how quickly a micro-black-hole would accumulate mass strikes me as a great undergrad tutorial question."
Which implies using existing theories to calculate it. What I think the grand parent post is saying is that we don't know for sure our current theories are all correct. After all, if we knew it all 100% correctly, there wouldn't be any need to build the LHC.
Scientific evidence accumulates over time. In science, its extremely hard to say 100% correct and be very careful of anyone who claims different.
Our current theories are our best current understanding of the universe and they do indeed work well. But we cannot be 100% sure. In the case of creating a black hole we won't know for sure until we create one under the conditions in the LHC (which due to the grouping of particle collisions in the LHC is different from a single high speed collision happening in the upper atmosphere).
Throughout the history of science we can see time and time again where theories were overturned. We therefore cannot assume all our current theories are correct under all possible conditions. There could be factors we are so far ignoring.
The problem is, the creation of a black hole in the LHC is kind of a unique experiment, as most wrong answers in science don't have such horrific results if our current theories are wrong.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
What people don't realize is that this study was funded by companies that produce black holes.
This is my sig.
How do we know with certainty how a black hole behaves? It would seem to me that studying something from millions of light years away where we only get indirect evidence is not the same of plunking one down in the middle of the earth and experiencing it firsthand.
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I doubt every scientist working on the project is also desiring to commit suicide/genocide/planetacide/whatever.
I just imagined a collective mad laughter, chorused by the entire LHC staff.
On freakishly perfect synchrony.
Like machines.
Or robots!
Oh my god!
It's the cutting edge of our understanding of how MBHs work, and _that_ understanding in turn depends on a quite large, quite solid foundation of math and physics.
So please, this isn't speculation, it's SCIENCE.
I thought science is when you confirm your theories by experimentation. I didn't know we've had the chance to confirm the precise mechanics of black holes via experimental observation.
At that stage, calling it "solid foundation" and deflecting doubts sounds to me more like religion, and not science.
The main lesson of science is to be humble, all scientific models are "incorrect" in the long term. While I don't find the LHC is a threat, the outcome of its tests will very likely surprise both sides of this discussion.
Let's say the current theories predict a gradually growing black hole, but what if in reality it's going to grow exponentially?
This sucks.
We are talking Micro Black Holes here, and those appear in our atmosphere quite often. So no, we don't need to look at far away galaxies to make some observations.
And yet it could be wrong. That's all the previous posts are saying. What would've happened if people got attached to the cutting edge understanding of gravity and electromagnetics during the late 1800's? Stop being a scientific arse and admit that you - or scientists - don't know everything. If they did, there would be no point in building the LHC after all. Science is an exercise in LEARNING.
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
In this case it's quite different. It's not religious zealots crying wolf at something they don't understand. It's rational people, some of them scientists, saying that we really don't know for sure, that our current knowledge could be flawed. A real scientist should always be ready to question our current knowledge.
Another way to put it: if we were so sure that what we know is 100% correct then we wouldn't need to build the LHC to test our theories in the first place.
can we use a micro-black hole to power a stargate? as ZPM's are hard to find.
Interesting. I haven't met a serious person who was freaked out by the black holes which could possibly generated by the LHC. Actually they are more afraid of the weak economy or the pigeon-flu (which they are more afraid of the vaccine than the actual disease). I guess the most of them who actually know that there is an LHC do not really think a lot about it as there are more pressing matters.
The problem is, there is cause for real concern. Maybe not with the LHC but with science in general. 1. The universe is vast, and old. It's quite clear that, if life is as common as we think it is, the universe should be filled with ancient civilizations. 2. We have no evidence of any alien life... where are they? 3. We have a very rudimentary understanding of physics. 4. It may very well be that it is common for civilizations to evolve to the point at which we are at but then mistakenly destroy themselves through, what at first appear to be benign experiments. Not saying it will be a micro blackhole... or even the LHC. But we had better watch it. There might be a very simple reason that SETI hasn't found anything yet. They're all dead.
Please don't go about shaking our belief systems. We need these uncertainties to keep being fearful of our vengeful gods.
"...I have a constant fear that somethings always near
I have a phobia that someone's always there
Fear of the dark, fear of the dark..."
..that he's got to be wrong.
Fixed that for ya.
Well yes but just because something could be wrong doesn't mean we should give no weight at all to their proposed mathematical model. That's like saying that our current understanding of gravity and electromagnetics (or evolution or whatever) COULD be wrong, so let's take all this egghead science stuff with a grain of salt. Everyone will freely acknowledge this, but like ID folks (I'm a biologist so pardon me for leaping to this example) the logical fallacy is then, "Well you could be wrong, and I could be wrong, so let's give equal credence to both our ideas." Which is silly, because just because two things might or might not be true doesn't mean they might or might not be true equally. Similarly, if a world-renowned physicist says something, and I say he might be wrong, everyone knows that already, but since he's put together a good model of a phenomenon based on our current understanding of how the universe works, there's no reason to assume it's all speculation and hand-waving.
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If they had not built the LHC, they would have used the money for other scientific projects. You could imagine (could you?) that they would then have just different jobs.
Even though. The people who built the LHC and those who might use it in future are not equal sets of people. The CERN is such a big institution, that there is fluctuation. Some scientists are even just guests there for some time, so do you really think that all of them (including those who work abroad and those who have not got enough funding of their projects because of the LHC will just quietly stand by and say nothing?).
All people who argued that the LHC is a World Dooms Machine are not physicists especially not particle physicists so why should they understand it better than particle physicists? And remember not all particle physicists work for CERN. There are others and the all say its save.
TFA's author has surely done his black hole research. Quoting:
"What's more, I haven't seen any black holes float around my neighborhood recently."
I'm sure he meant some kind of gravitational lensing effect, or maybe some kind of high-energy radiation from an accretion disk or gas jet.
Yeah, but those are the same people who think aliens are traveling across the vast distances of interstellar space to play ass-grab with rednecks in trailer parks. You have about as much chance of educating the unwashed masses as you do of convincing them to become washed masses. Best to keep sedating them with sports.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Am I the only one who reads MBH as mega black hole, not micro black hole? It's confusing. If the prefix is micro, it would make sense to use a letter that actually means micro, instead of a letter that represents mega.
"... if you're a megalomaniac looking for your next globe-eating weapon,... a speedy MBH ... flying through our planet... will only have a few seconds to accrete the mass of ... the Earth ."
WE'RE DOOMED!
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
It's perfectly possible to pack matter into it's own Schwartzchild radius, that is the radius at which the escape velocity from the collective body is greater than the speed of light. Once the escape velocity is greater than the speed of light, nothing can escape and so a black-hole is by definition formed.
If you're really interested, you really need to study General Relativity to properly prove the plausibility of their existence.
Interesting. I wasn't aware that this was the case. Can you point me to any good discussions on studies on these black holes or even if they have truly been detected. Wikipedia seems to indicate that they are only theoretical...
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Of course they're saying there is no cause for concern, it's their job that's on the line. Risks to humanity, the planet etc. be damned, we want our LHC!
Fortunately, we can rely on our trusty baguette dropping birds to save humanity from its certain fate by annihilation. Vive la France!
Sam Hughes will be so disappointed
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
The existence of a Schwartzchild radius assumes that gravity can ever be stronger than the repulsive forces within the nucleus. It cannot. Both increase simultaneously as you increase mass. Gravity's attractive force will never be stronger than the electrostatic forces that hold the particles apart.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Come on guys, this is not rocket science!
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
To clarify that: because the attractive and repulsive forces scale simultaneously, and because the repulsive forces will always be much larger than the attractive forces, it is impossible to pack any amount of matter within its own Schwartzchild radius.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Black-holes are not a source of energy (excluding the monumentally tiny energy output via Hawking radiation), any energy gained harnessing black-holes would be from the accretion disk around them in which particles accelerating towards the black-hole emit radiation due to friction among themselves. However, you'd likely need a stellar-mass black-hole to get a realistic accretion disk going.
Anyway, ZPMs aren't hard to find, you just need Ancient-built replicator civilisations or time travel.
used a time machine made with mini black holes, in case you guys have forgotten..
I thought science is when you confirm your theories by experimentation.
Science is the interplay between theory and experiment. Developing fields don't have to rigidly follow the hypothesis->experiment->modification->hypothesis->etc. model or risk being rejected as unscientific. Theoreticians and researchers can make valuable advances on untested theoretical work or unexplained experimental results to try to fill out new, poorly understood areas. The popular perception that science must evolve according to rigid principles is simply false. Like any other discipline it evolves organically and blunders in incorrect directions are often extremely valuable.
The important element that separates the scientists from the crackpots is lively debate and exchange with the broader community, not dogmatic pursuit of a rigid notion of scientific method. Everything within that debate is science. (Peer-review is the formalized structure of the debate and, while it's very far from perfect, does a decent job of filtering out the noise.)
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
The argument goes like this: There are plenty of cosmic rays which impact our atmosphere, the other planets in the solar system, the sun, other stars, everything, with energies across a huge spectrum, including LHC energies. Either the LHC will produce MBH or it will not. If it will, then cosmic rays also produce MBH, and do so without destroying any of the things we can see in the sky, so MBH from the LHC would similarly not destroy the earth. If the LHC will not produce MBH, then we have nothing to worry about in that regard anyway.
;)
This argument works for just about any Earth destroying LHC scenario, except, I suppose, the time traveling killer Higgs
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
The math that suggests that a quantum black hole will evaporate in an instant may be fairly advanced, but the math showing that even if Hawking is completely wrong such a black hole would have no noticeable effect on the earth over a 13 billion year period is not all that advanced.
Then there's simple logic. While LHC may produce the most powerful collisions ever under our control, nature routinely produces much more powerful collisions including cosmic rays. Clearly, in billions of years none of this has resulted in a planet eating black hole.
I'm more worried about the possibility of a resonance cascade.
Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands!
Ah, but that's not the case.
On small scales, that is true. However, take the moon. Electromagnetically it's neutral, however it exerts a sizeable gravitational pull. As the Schwartzchild radius is proportional to mass (not mass squared or cubed, but mass), if one took instead 8 moons and packed them together in a cuboid arrangement, the mass has increased eight-fold while the radius has only doubled. Therefore if we keep adding mass, there will come a point when the Scwarzschild radius is larger than the radius of the huge moon-array and therefore the whole moon-array has an escape velocity greater than the speed of light and is therefore a black-hole.
Now imagine if all those moons are positively charged - it still doesn't matter, because no matter the strength of the outward force it cannot give them a velocity greater than that of the speed of light, so they remain a black-hole.
Gravity is so significant on large scales precisely because of this - with no negative charge, gravity is the most significant force at large distance scales.
I'm not so sure. The behavior of electrons is not well-known: it's not even certain whether they have internal structure or not. However their behavior in an electric circuit is well-described by very old physics. Likewise the formation and evaporation of micro-black-holes is not very well theorised, however their essential and most threatening property - their gravitational attraction - is very well-defined, even at masses as low as those of protons. Whether these black holes would mass less than that, I don't know.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
...where it will evaporate...
I'm no physicist, by any stretch of the imagination, but black holes "evaporating" just doesn't sound right to me.
Proverbs 21:19
There goes another billion dollars. Back to the drawing board.
Meh.
Why worry? I am a firm believer that causality is forcing the LHC to not work, since if it did, it would un-create itself across the entire timeline.
Anyone called?
Mod points are a dangerous tool. Abuse them wisely.
Well, yes, any matter you throw at it (and energy converts neatly to matter too) can only cause it to grow. But there's still the problem of how much and how close.
But, really, let's do some simple maths.
Let's say we want to produce a black hole the size of a helium atom. You know, big enough to occasionally actually bounce into stuff and gobble it up. (Remember, only matter coming closer than the Schwarzschild radius is actually gobbled up.) It's not a big black hole, but it has the potential to grow. So we apply:
r = (2G/c^2) * m ... Where the thing in brackets is approx 1.5 * 10^-27 m/kg. We'll want to get a hole measuring 3x10^-11 m. So we'd need a mass of 2x10^15 kg, or two millions of millions of metric tons.
Yep, that huge a mass will only gobble stuff up if it comes within 3x10^-11m of it. But it's a start, and as an evil genius you may have to start small ;)
To produce that hole, the protons we throw at it, as a total, will have to have the equivalent of that much mass in energy.
Let's transform that into MeV though, since we are talking energy. 1MeV is about 1.8x10^-36 Kg. Let's round to 2x10^-36, since we're only doing a back-of-the-napkin calculation, and are only interested in rough ballpark figures. So we're talking about 10^51 MeV
If we got that energy from uranium, and assuming that we could (A) split every single U235 atom, and (B) capture 100% of the released energy, each atom split releases 180 MeV. (RL reactors don't come even close in both aspects.) Again, let's round it up to 200. (In my fantasy land, reactors are better than 100% efficient;)
That works out to about 5*10^48 uranium atoms split. Avogadro's number being about 6x10^23, that's about 10^25 moles of uranium. (Again, I'm only interested in the order of magnitude. Plus, we rounded up in the other direction before, so it evens up.) And a mole of U235 weighs 235 grams, or about half a pound or almost a quarter kilo.
We're talking about 2 to 3 times 10^24 kilos of uranium, or 2 to 3 times 10^21 _tons_ of U235. That's 2-3 thousand billions of billions of tons of U235. Or about a hundred thousands of billions of billions of reactor-grade enriched uranium. Completely used up in a 100% effective reactor.
So basically yes we _could_ make a bigger black hole by keeping throwing stuff at it, close to the speed of light, but the energy requirements are nuts even to get a hole the size of a helium atom. We don't even _have_ the kind of reactors and capacitors where you could split a hundred thousands of billions of billions of reactor-grade uranium and dump it all into just creating a black hole.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
It's good to know that they can still be used to kill your nemesis and NOT destroy the Earth (or Mars).
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
We know how a black hole behaves by working with the theory. Essentially, a black hole can be modeled as a particle with large mass and possibly some charge and/or spin. It has no other definable qualities. Plug a particle like that into your equations and it's not difficult to calculate its behavior.
Of course, physicists are known for making models that are simplified to the point of absurdity. Have you heard the story of the model that assumed massless, spherical cows?
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
If a black hole absorbs all within its gravitational field including energy (light) , then how exactly does it evaporate?
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
TFA calculates the likely results based on higher dimensional brane physics. It was done earlier in more classical relativity maths and the results summarized in Alan Boyle's Cosmic Log. The max mass was greater and thus life time longer. Still, mass and accretion never crossed the limit that would allow it to reach whatever they call critical mass for these thing. The example given was that if it were charged and it were trapped within the electron cloud of an atom (both conditions lending it additional life span), it would circulate there on the order of weeks before encountering an electron which it could then consume. Even if it did so it would evaporate before it could hit the run away point, and would likely evaporate before eating even one electron. The specific results were different but the conclusion the same - too small to live long enough to do any damage.
Another point made in Cosmic Log (I don't recall if it was the same person/calculations) was that quantum black holes (a more correct descriptor than 'mini-') of the mass and life span hypothesized would be likely to occur regularly in the atmosphere due to incoming primary cosmic rays. Those have been impacting the Earth for billions of years, and we're still here. The hypothesized Hawking radiation is not obvious, thus these may not even be occurring. In any case, their creation would be a highly improbable event.
That last assertion is strictly conjecture based on calculations by my Brambleweeny 57 sub-meson brain. Now if you'll excuse me I'm for a nice hot cup of tea.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
They only talk about the black hole being unable to suck anything in because its mass is to low, but what abbout atmospheric pressure pushing matter into it and growing it like that? It might be to weak to feed itself but if its forcefed matter deu to pressure in the atmosphere, it should still grow.
This isn't strictly true. In principle it's possible to extract energy directly from the ergosphere of a rotating black hole -- regardless of whether or not there's an accretion disc there. This is known as the Penrose process and it's been known for a good length of time (since the mid 60s, I'd guess, soon after the Kerr solution was found). Basically, you fly into the ergosphere and throw matter into the black hole against its spin. If you get it right then you emerge from the ergosphere with more energy than you entered it. The energy you pull out is balanced against the slowing of the hole's spin.
Of course, actually *utilising* this would be extremely tough, but in principle it would work.
(More details could be found in Sean Carroll's lecture notes on GR, in the chapter about black holes, http://preposterousuniverse.com/grnotes/seven.ps)
Why not go argue it out with stephen hawking. I'm sure you're right and hundreds of cosmologists have got their maths all wrong.
Sadly however, people will read this article and will still freak out about how the LHC is going to doom us all.
Still, the LHC *can* make an fairly impressive mess of the test chamber area something goes wrong. I'd recommend being at least a few miles away from it while it's running.
http://www.scientificblogging.com/big_science_gambles/interview_professor_otto_rossler_takes_on_the_lhc
And interesting discussion on this that I found. It's very likely that the resulting explosion would "save the planet" as a side effect, but make for a very impressive crater as well.
A mini black hole will only "exert a near-zero gravitational pull on matter" if the matter is somewhat further away that the schwartzchild radius. If it gets anywhere near that then it'll be anything but non zero. After all , if the black hole had almost no gravity it couldn't hold light in and therefore by definition wouldn't be a black hole. I suspect the physicists and banking on the black hole travelling through atoms in the same way that for example neutrinos do - in that the atom to them is effectively empty space with a tiny compact nucleus which is so small that the chances of a direct hit are minimum. We have no absolute guarantee however that a black hole will behave the same way as an uncharged elementary particle.
The Schwartzchild radius is the result of some clever but wrong algebraic operations.
You can cleverly look at the formula v(t) = at and decide "if a equals 1 m/s^2, then in 10 years I will be traveling at a little over 105% of c".
Similarly, you can cleverly look at the formula for the gravitational field and determine how much matter you need at a given density to make (A) the radius at which the field equals the speed of light equal to (B) the radius of your sphere of mass.
Both are incorrect, for the same reason.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
We can't be exactly sure, no.
However, even basic physics should be enough to determine that microscopic black holes aren't going to be particularly dangerous. The kind of black holes that could be created by the LHC have a very small mass - they're created by smashing a couple of subatomic particles into each other, after all. The total mass of the black hole can not possibly be higher than the total mass of the particles that created it.
That means that the black hole will have the same gravitational force as the particles that created it. Therefore, the event horizon of the black hole will be very small. Since matter is composed mostly of empty space, the chances of it actually hitting anything are remote, to say the least. In order for it to absorb a particle, it would have to almost collide with it. This is very unlikely, although given enough time probably will happen.
Worst case scenario - Hawking radiation doesn't exist. The micro black holes will continue to exist indefinitely, and will slowly consume the planet. Before the micro black hole has absorbed even a few kilograms of matter, the Sun will expand, swallowing the planet. The black holes will continue gradually consuming the Sun, and given a few quadrillion years or so (and the entire universe will be long dead by that point) might actually start to do some damage. By this point, I doubt that any humans will still be around to care. If we've managed to survive the destruction of our own planet, the death of our own star, and the death of the universe itself, a puny little black hole shouldn't be a problem.
More likely scenario - Hawking radiation does exist, and the micro black holes will simply evaporate before they even come close to absorbing anything else. No big deal. If we detect evidence of Hawking radiation, that pretty much confirms the existence of black holes, and Steven Hawking gets a Nobel prize.
We've got one of the best particle accelerators around (the Sun/Sol) and it hasn't managed to snuff us out yet and it's had BILLIONS of years. The LHC doesn't even come close in power levels comparatively speaking.
first Ringworld was claimed to be impossible, and now the same happens with his 70's story "The Hole Man", where what happens is essentially involves a micro black hole falling into a planet. Science is slowly killing hard sci-fi.
"Likewise the formation and evaporation of micro-black-holes is not very well theorised" and from the other poster "what if in reality it's going to grow exponentially"
* Also what happens if two or more black holes are created that can then collide with each other?
* Can one black hole like particle influence the decay of another black hole particle?.
* Could 3 or 4 acting together grow exponentially more easily than one on its own?
* Also how would micro-black-hole particle groups behave in other collisions with other non-black holes like particles?
We have current theories that tell us what to expect, but we won't know for sure until we try it. But is it even to dangerous to try it?
Also its extremely unlikely for multiple black hole like particles to (almost) ever collide in space or in a planet or in its upper atmosphere, but due to the grouping of collisions in the LHC its very possible and it certainly cannot be ruled out or even prevented. Therefore we cannot use the single collision in the upper atmosphere idea as a guide to assume multiple collisions are safe.
Ultimately scientific discovery is a process of trial and error. We think we know what we are doing and our theories work very well so we really do think we know precisely what we are doing, but ultimately for us to make any discovery, it can result in showing us something we didn't expect. So there is an element of trial and error leading to a discovery. (Its partly what makes it so interesting).
The process of discovery is vital to science to find more evidence to support or disprove our current theories, but the almost unique problem we are faced with the LHC and the possibility of creating black hole like particles, is that for the first time, the process of discovery of finding something bad has potentially globally horrific results.
It comes down to a problem of deciding the risk/reward ratio of doing any experiment. It would be nice to say with almost all experiments in the history of science, there have never been any global scale hazardous repercussions to consider of them going wrong, (although thats obviously not entirely true). But in the case of the LHC the almost unique risks are on such a huge scale, we have almost never encountered anything like this before, so its very hard to imagine and easy to dismiss, as its way beyond the norm of what we usually have to consider.
I don't have answers, just ever more questions. But I very much think its a very important philosophical question we are all faced with. Is there ever going to be an experiment that is too dangerous for us all to try and will we even know before we attempt to try it?
Also with such huge prizes of world glory of Nobel prizes (and so on) combined with the ever present endless fascination of whats possible and seeking that new discovery, I very much suspect there will always be some people who want to push and gamble for such huge prizes whatever the potential risks. But then almost no one in science really wants to hold back discoveries. (We are like a bunch of discovery junkies, always wanting that next fix of another discovery). But then who will say no, its too dangerous around so many of us who want to say yes, go for it?
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
A week before they turn it on to produce the MBH and destroy the Earth I will buy anyones home for 5 cents on the dollar so they can spend their last week in a continuous state of Party.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
There are a lot of black holes in the observable universe. I think it is fairly inaccurate to say "do so without destroying any of the things we can see in the sky".
Very true but what if we used the Micro-black holes as a way to jump start the Stargate? Just place a MBH the center of the Stargate, now you don't require as much energy to open a wormhole. I can't say for certain but it very well may be more energy efficient to create a MBH than start up the SG. Also maybe and again I can't be certain but a SC requires a large amount of energy to be used all at once, that requires massive capacity to get it to work; with a MBH you may be able to grow one at a slower rate in other words it requires the same amount of energy but you don't need to have it all at once.
The whole planet-eating-micro-black-hole thing was already covered in David Brin's _Earth_.
I would rather have these theories be facts. It is still possible the the theories are wrong. If proven wrong, we all could be screwed.
Skip mars, we nee to get to Jupiter or Saturn. Build the LHC there and try this. Worst that can happen is we find this black rectangle thing and we get a second star. Or the facility opens up a hole to a separate demon dimension.
In all seriousness I hope their theories are correct. And those theories are proven correct.
Actually it's freshman-level physics.
Do you mean Freeman-level physics?
I guess some black holes DON'T suck... *takes a bow*
This needs more cowbell!!!
Yeah , whatever. Like I said , I'm sure you're right and the worlds top physicists and cosmologists can't do simple maths.
You'll note, however, that there aren't any rational scientists who say our current knowledge could be flawed - AND THE LHC WILL DESTROY THE EARTH.
Optic fibers, transistors, structures in modern microchips hitting quantum effects more and more (requiring workarounds), magnetoresistive effect in HDDs, and so on...all speculation to you.
One that hath name thou can not otter
What did they get into the space between G.W. Bush ears then? It sucked everything that mattered and crushed it in some strange space time continuum know as "his presidency". Researchers are still baffled....
This is a typical nonsense argument. You imply that because there are some things we don't know (e.g., questions to be answered by the LHC) that it's reasonably possible that we will encounter aberrant behavior that contradicts previous observation.
There are few avenues for the MBH to be incorrect. They already assume that we are wrong about Hawking radiation (otherwise an MBH would boil off immediately). The only real options are that energy conservation is violated and the LHC is able to somehow create a heavy black hole, or the gravitational pull of a MBH is somehow enormously higher than its mass-energy would permit. (As the Schwartzchild radius is directly derived from its gravitational pull, there's not really any room for this to be wrong.)
You actually picked the weak form of this argument.
Our planet is small and not particularly dense. There's only one, and something like MBH or strangelets could be fairly rare. We could be lucky.
Fortunately, there's an enormous field of stars, including large, dense neutron stars. Neutron stars are great at capturing errant particles, producing MBHes, and things like that. Looking at our estimates of the ages of these neutron stars, you can show that micro black holes cannot be responsible for stellar/planetary destruction.
which due to the grouping of particle collisions in the LHC is different from a single high speed collision happening in the upper atmosphere
This statement makes no sense. The quarks have no clue if they're in the atmosphere or the LHC.
The ignorant, murderous assholes who have been making a living for themselves inducing panic in people by waving their hands about LHC black holes have been making much of this "we don't know everything" rhetoric. But unlike the scientists who have performed these actual calculations, the ignorant murderous assholes have never produced any numbers: just vague handwaving and wild specuation that requires almost everything we know about physics to be wrong (expect for a few very carefully chosen bits they need to be right to keep thier speculations afloat.)
In fact, if you are worried about LHC black holes destroying the Earth then you should ALSO be worried that clicking your heels together three times and saying, "There's no place like home" will turn you into a bowl of cornflakes. After all, we can't be 100% sure it won't happen, and in fact the probability of it happening is slightly higher than the bizzare balance of known and novel physics that would be required to allow the LHC to create black holes, much less have them destroy the Earth.
So my question to the ignorant murderous assholes is: why are you making such a fuss about LHC black holes when there are so many millions of other things that pose a far greater risk to the Earth? Giant asteroid collisions caused by global warming (the atmosphere expands, increasing the odds of impact). Death by cell phone radiation interacting with the local galactic magentic field causing the Earth to fall into the sun. And so on. If you are worried about LHC black holes you have set the thresold for worry so low that if you aren't completely intellectually dishonest there are a vast array of other risks you should be in a panic about.
So why aren't you?
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
At the Schwartzchild radius, the gravitational field is supposedly equal to the speed of light.
This is meaningless. The units of the "gravitational field" are not those of veloicty, therefore the "gravitational field" is not hte speed of light. Nor is that the definition of a black hole. A "black hole" is actually defined as a region of spacetime that is causally disconnected -- meaning that no null geodesics originating from within the event horizon can leave the event horizon.
This is not possible, according to physics, because it takes an infinite field to accelerate any nonzero mass to the speed of light. The gravitational field will never reach the speed of light, because the gravitational field would then be infinite.
This is bewildering. Are you trying to tell me that the gravitational field is a massive particle? Because if so you're dead wrong. If you must attribute it to some virtual particle or other then that would be a graviton, a massless spin-2 particle that travels *at* the speed of light and can never be slowed from it. Classical GR does not associate the gravitational field with any particle at all; rather, it is pure geometry.
Basically, you're assuming that the formula for gravitational field works according to the normal algebraic laws, but this is not the case.
On the contrary, *you're* assuming that the gravitational field operates according to Newton's laws, and is a massive particle. This is not the case. GR is nothing more than an identification of "gravity" with the distortions of spacetime due to mass. Quite clearly this does not operate according to "normal algebraic laws". It works, if you're interestd (which you appear not to be or you could have learned this from Wikipedia) by differential geometry -- tensor calculus, if you prefer.
It is exactly the same situation as if you assumed that the algebraic function v(t) = at could be extended to infinity. It can't. Integrating a constant acceleration, as time goes to infinity the formula says that velocity should also go to infinity. It doesn't. It is asymptotically limited by the speed of light, which is a non-infinite constant.
The gravitational field is also asymptotically limited by the speed of light.
So you're trying to use special relativity to disprove a black hole based on the assumption that gravity is carried by a massive particle. OK, right... You are aware that general relativity was formulated because Einstein ran into problems incorporating gravity into special relativity? Clearly not.
Suck! Suck! Suck!
Sorry... :)
I look at this and I see "the speed of the molecules at room temperature v is approximately 500 meters per sec., so the molecule has of order 10^10 collisions per second."
Which I did indeed do in sophomore physics or freshmen chem.
That seems like a lot of collisions to me. Then again, 6.0221415 × 10^23 says that it's going to take about 317,097 years (unless I made a math error) before that tiny little particle reaches about 7 grams or so.
However, at some point it'd going to be dense enough (perhaps after the first minute of collisions), that conservation of momentum will stop being enough to keep it from traveling to the center of the earth.
Once it finally rests there (not sure how long that takes since it's effectively going to go into orbit 'through' the planet), it seems the intense pressure would allow it to 'eat' the center of the planet very quickly.
Another way to put it: if we were so sure that what we know is 100% correct then we wouldn't need to build the LHC to test our theories in the first place.
There's a nice equivocation in this statement: we can be as sure as we are of anything that LHC black holes won't destroy the Earth. If they did we'd see evidence in the cosmic-ray spectrum due to evaporating black hole signatures and the like, as well as the Earth not actually being here because it would have been destroyed in the past.
So while we do need to build the LHC to test theories regarding the Higgs boson, we do not need to build it to test theories regarding LHC black holes. That's the thing about science: all sources of experimental knowledge are equally valid, and you don't get to say our knowlege of black holes supposedly created by high energy collisions "doesn't count" because it comes from cosmic rays rather than accelerators.
Furthermore, I'm not sure why you and others keep bringing up the 100% correct thing. You can't be sure 100% certainty that the act of typing your next post into /. won't invoke some as-yet-to-be-discovered physical law and cause you to grow a second head. But for some reason you won't explain you aren't worried about that, even though you seem to pretend to be worried about LHC black holes destroying the Earth, which has no greater probablity.
Why is that? Why aren't you posting about all the other things that you can't be 100% sure of not destroying the Earth? Why only the LHC and not hitherto undiscovered physical laws that will cause the DROID phone to result in the death of us all? The "not 100% sure" standard is so silly that you'd have to terrified of damned near everything, if you were remotely intellectually honest.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Granted that very small black holes cannot eat fast enough to threaten Earth, this raises the question: "How large would a black hole have to be to be a threat to Earth"?
Can any one generate a black hole mass/time-to-eat-the Earth table? Enquiring minds want to know!
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
You sir win. Let them worry about monopoles instead! I personally love the Doomsayers... They keep me quite entertained with their lack of scientific understanding. I can't wait until they start running up their credit cards in advance of Dec 2012.
The units of the "gravitational field" are not those of veloicty
No, they are units of acceleration, m/s^2. My point was that it is impossible for a finite gravitational field to accelerate anything to the speed of light. Not that the field itself equaled the speed of light, but that the field integrated over some finite time supposedly equaled the speed of light, which is impossible for any finite field.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Which implies using existing theories to calculate it. What I think the grand parent post is saying is that we don't know for sure our current theories are all correct. After all, if we knew it all 100% correctly, there wouldn't be any need to build the LHC.
This line of logic is ridiculous. We're building the LHC to explore many things, one of which is probing a few plausible alternate theories that predict black hole production at a measurable rate. But the assumption that that means we can't come up with logically-consistent explanations of how such a black-hole would behave is ridiculous. You can put some bounds on it, right? You can say that a black hole won't make bunnies leap out of the wall. Not because it *sounds* ridiculous, but because there's no mathematically and logically internally consistent theory under which such a thing could happen. You can keep moving this line until you start finding regimes of behavior that might be consistent with new theories allowed, compatible with previous observations but allowing new ones under these new conditions. And that's what theorists are doing!
Any claim of unexpected behavior without a plausible and mathematically self-consistent theory to back it up is baseless. Which isn't to say one doesn't exist (the whole absence of evidence thing), but until one does, there's just as much sense to prepare for the coming bunny invasion.
we need the gate address to dial them
I don't understand. Why does packing matter within its Schwartzchild radius equate to singularity -- zero volume. Couldn't it just be very very small?
OK then, your point is still wrong because nowhere does the theory say that a massive object has been accelerated to the speed of light. What the theory actually says is that null geodesics (which massless particles travel along) are trapped within the event horizon. The geodesics that massive particles travel along (in the absence of an external force -- remember that gravity is *not* a force if you're working within GR) lie within the "light cone", which is the future-directed map of all null geodesics. Since the future light cone is entirely within the black hole -- because the null geodesics themselves are -- massive particles can't escape either.
To rephrase this avoiding words like "geodesic" and "null" which are part of the jargon of differential geometry that general relativity inherited, consider a patch of normal, flat spacetime. Then we can imagine shining a torch, and map out everywhere that light can get to from it in the future. This is the "future light cone". Since every massive particle must travel slower than light, the paths of the moths flying along the lightbeam have to be *inside* the future light cone.
Now let's put some matter there. Matter bends spacetime, and the best way of mapping this (best=cleanest, not only) is with the future light cone. Put an object beside the future light cone, and it bends towards it. In Newtonian gravity this would be ascribed to a force acting on the light as a result of the object being there; but that is a *Newtonian* image. In relativity, it's just a consequence of the matter distorting the geometry. If you get an object that's massive neough, you can visualise it tilting the light cone enough that it's entirely bent around and points to the centre of the object. A black hole is an object where this happens, and the "event horizon" is the hypothetical sphere at which point all future light cones bend just enough that they inevitably hit the centre of the object.
Since all massive particles follow paths *inside* the future light cone, they also must inevitably hit the centre of the object.
Nothing has been accelerated to speeds greater than light, nothing has violated special relativity -- btu special relativity *does not and cannot apply* here. Special relativity, viewed one way, is what you get when you remove all the matter from general relativity. It intrinsically does not apply to gravity and arguments including gravity in special relativity have to be made extremely carefully to make sure they apply.
Sadly however, people will read this article
No, they won't.
The problem with this whole situation is that I can't verify it myself in the next couple of days. I do not have the skills or foundational knowledge. The problem with this whole thing is that these scientists are asking 99.9999% of the public to trust them,w e won't get you killed by a black hole. We can't tell if they are worthy of that much trust. Maybe their calculations are tinged by self interest or tinged by interest in the the possible scientific discovery.
The point is, most of us have no way of knowing, but black holes have a way of sounding scary. We may be ignorant, but we are definitely self serving.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
Speculation: We haven't seen evidence of other species because of collider experiments keep killing off the smart ones.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
So if the earth became a black hole with a Schwartzchild radius of 9mm, would it evaporate and if so how long would it take?
It pays to be prepared
* Also what happens if two or more black holes are created that can then collide with each other? * Can one black hole like particle influence the decay of another black hole particle?. * Could 3 or 4 acting together grow exponentially more easily than one on its own? * Also how would micro-black-hole particle groups behave in other collisions with other non-black holes like particles?
You have to understand that in asking these questions you're implicitly making analogies with the macroscopic world. You're asking for answers to questions that, at the scale and regime of the LHC, may be the equivalent of asking "what does blue sound like?"
As soon as matter is packed inside its own Schwarzchild radius it will inevitably collapse to a singularity (at least, if you believe GR is valid all the way to the singularity itself; in reality, some form of quantum corrections will come into play at some point, at which point all bets are off. But the scales that will happen on is *well* inside the event horizon even of holes the LHC would ever create.) Basically, anything that cross the event horizon is doomed to hit the singularity, no matter what, simply because *light* is doomed to hit the singularity, and nothing travels faster than light.
So you can pack the matter over its event horizon fine, but it's not going to hang around there, it will collapse. From the outside it's a pretty academic poit, though -- the gravitational field is the same whether or not the matter is at the singularity, and what we'd *observe* (if we could see the event horizon, which we can't because no light comes from it) is actually an image of the matter just as it passed over, due to an ever-increasing gravitational time dilation as you approach the horizon.
I hope that makes sense. If not, basically if you chuck a football at the event horizon of a black hole, you'll see it moving ever more slowly (because of a strong time dilation) and getting ever dimmer (because the light is getting redder and redder), and never quite touching the event horizon. The same applies to the matter that formed the black hole itself.
Inside, it's less than a microsecond to slam into the singularity, of course...
goatse.fr works
The main lesson of science is to be humble, all scientific models are "incorrect" in the long term.
But they're not *equally* incorrect. They're as good as they are useful at modeling the world around us in their particular regimes.
We don't put Newton by the wayside just because we know about GR. And likewise if GR is ever expanded on or replaced, we still might use it to correct the time-slew of GPS satellites. It's about the best tool available for the job. And right now, the best tool for making decisions about the behavior of black holes and high-energy interactions based on the evidence available is telling us not to worry. What cause otherwise *is* there to worry? The fact that the word "black hole" happens to relate to a concept that scares people?
I think the LHC has destroyed the world multiple times now. It is just that we here and now are the survivors of the disasters....
According to the Multi-verse theory, each quantum fluctuation creates a new universe or timeline.....
Because we are alive and well and not consumed by a black hole, that means in "our" branch of the multiverse we haven't created a Black Hole that swallows earth "yet".....
But fear not because Even if the LHC were to create a earth consuming black hole, strangelet, way to lower the energy level entire universe leading to it's immediate destruction. We will survive because at least one branch of timeline will survive by failing to create these anomolies and go on to branch out some more to survive whatever weird physics experiments we dream up of go arwy.....
The only problem is when creating black hols and exotic matter that is large enough to reduce quantum probability and then we are really screwed.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
The total mass of the black hole can not possibly be higher than the total mass of the particles that created it.
That is not true. The total mass of the black hole can possibly be anything between zero and the total mass of the particles that created it in addition to the mass equivalent of the kinetic energies of those particles.
I could part with one doomsday device and still be feared.
You can say that a black hole won't make bunnies leap out of the wall.
I very well can say that. Heisenburg's Uncertainty Principle certainly allows for the possibility that the black hole and some other matter can take positions that correspond exactly with what one would observe from bunnies leaping out of the wall (however unlikely that might be).
Let's say the current theories predict a gradually growing black hole, but what if in reality it's going to grow exponentially?
Lets assume that 2 virtual particles come into existence and those particles are in reality miniature black holes which merge together to form a larger black hole. These two particles don't evaporate immediately because Special Relativity slows down time for them so as they never actually collide. This hungry black hole then begins to feed on the protons around it, growing exponentially as it falls into the center of of the earth, eventually consuming the entire planet.
And in case some twit doesn't get it, this is sarcasm.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Gravity is much, much weaker than the subatomic electrostatic forces that hold subatomic particles apart.
It really isn't, not in the way that you mean. Yes the Gravitational Constant is much smaller than Coulomb's Constant, and yes the gravitational attraction between two protons is much weaker than the electrostatic repulsion between two protons.
However as soon as you do anything more complicated than compare two charged particles, things change. The reason is because the two forces bind to different properties of matter, and while the charge property can be both positive and negative, mass is only positive. So while the gravitational force between two hydrogen atoms is very small, it is bigger than the electrostatic force between them because they are carrying no net charge.
Thus gravity can easily be the stronger force in any given situation, because the forces of opposite charges will cancel, while their masses will only add together. Put enough mass together, and the gravitational force can easily outstrip every other force.
In essence, what you're claiming in a black hole is a neutron star - a single massive nucleus - packed together as tightly as is physically possible for matter to be packed. This is impossible on the most basic level: the larger an atomic nucleus gets, the more unstable it is. There are no stable atomic nuclei any larger than lead-208.
Kind of an ironic statement, since the electrostatic force is much, much weaker than the strong nuclear force which holds the protons together, and yet it is exactly because of the electrostatic force overcoming the strong force that these atoms become unstable. Because the strong force is only stronger in the same naive way in which electromagnetism is stronger than gravity.
Also ironic because gravity overcoming electrostatic forces is also responsible for the existence of all of those large, unstable atoms in the first place. Fusing even two hydrogen atoms requires overcoming the repulsion of their nuclei when very close, and it's the intense heat and pressure in the core of a star -- caused by its immense mass -- which allows this. As the star over time fuses heavier elements the energy released decreases until lead where it crosses over into negative. At this point all the fusion energy that was holding the mass of the star up fails, and all that mass in the outer portions of the star collapses in due to gravity, and that transfer of energy fuses atoms much, much heavier than lead and leads to all the unstable elements we find on earth plus many that don't last long enough to become part of a planet.
Gravity, the "weakest" force, creates atoms which the strong interaction, the "strongest" force, cannot hold together!
So, obviously the situation is more complex than just making a blanket statement that one force is stronger than the other.
The enemies of Democracy are
Oh, you mean like the possibility of the earths atmosphere igniting and killing all life on earth? This was one possibility of the first atomic bomb test. Still did it anyway. Nothing happened.
Seems to me that the only possible ways to develop a time machine or starship warp drive are from manufacturing and harnessing Black Holes. We need to poke a singularity in the fabric of the universe to get around some hard limits like the speed of light. The trick then is how to arrange them geometrically to get the desired result (and how to control them to do this). Seems like really worthwhile research.
So it is that, in our version, the electrical meltdown in the LHC saved this universe? For a year...? Have we gotten to the point where because we got scientists saying they can see the swinging stars going around the black hole at galactic center and planets around other stars we think we know anything about physics??! I thought those theories just got a handle on the whole fractoidal, depends-what-scale-you're-at thing about physics down... Folks here post that 'it can't be dangerous, because we haven't seen them when we look out at the stars.' I keep thinking about those sage words: "Space is big... I mean, really big..." They're probably out there chewing on something. But to summon one up next to the only planet we've got is a bit scary.
"I got it all together but I forgot where I put it."
"Physicists are getting excited about the possibility of micro-black holes (MBH) being produced by the LHC"
no, not really. In fact the pretty much dismiss them sine they ran these numbers many years ago.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You are confusing time line branches with the multiverse theory. I will address both:
NOTHING we do in this universe impacts another universe in any way what so ever due to are friend decohesion
Creating a new time line doesn't mean that the new time line can violate physics. So even in a other time lines, the LHC does not destroy the planet.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Actually, in my experience conspiracy theorists don't watch sports, as they feel all matches are fixed by the "elite".
I'd like to add to your redneck ass-grabbing example. I have met numerous people, including a guy I worked with on my last contract, who believed in one or more of:
- an alien lizard conspiracy which secretly rules the Earth
- the global warming "hoax" that is being foisted upon us by ne'er-do-well climate scientists seeking to enrich themselves
- the Bilderberg group of rich people who secretly rule the world (optionally under the watchful eyes of the lizard dudes)
- hollow Earth - not kidding, I met a girl who was way into this piece of nutbaggery
- the Face on Mars people, who have gone silent since the Mars Global Surveyor took better pictures
- "Moon landing never happened" people - I know a girl who works in administration at the local Science World who believes this, and I am not making this up
- of course, all the 9/11 conspiracy people
Etc., etc. These are the types who believe the LHC poses a threat. No science background and probably a good dose of attention-seeking - so why are we even discussing this?
I can remember this being explained in a much better way in the very first article I ever read about the LHC, back when the start of construction was planned for the next weeks.!
It's just that the sensationalist retards of course ignored that part from then on.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
You also make the assumption that gravity makes black holes. I'm not too versed in math, but logic in general is easy
#1. Gravity's attractive force will never be stronger than the electrostatic forces that hold the particles apart. One word.. FUSION and I'm not talking about DBZ.
#2. Black holes are formed by super nova explosions that can release more energy in one second than if you broke our entire sun down into pure energy. This is NOT gravity, this is an explosive force. Simple "for every action there is an opposite and equal reaction" logic
#3. Accretion discs. The gravitation forces in the discs is enough to cause fusion, which already exceeds the electrostatic force. Now, as you approach this object that you claim isn't a black hole, the gravitational forces increase by magnitudes. At some point the gravitational force is going to many many many times greater than the electrostatic force.Even if matter doesn't actually get pulled into the "massive" object, it may get accelerated near the speed of light, shoot out of one of the poles and dump excess energy as x-rays.
So, in order to disprove black holes, you'll have to disprove speed of light gravitational forces, which are already happening. Not to mention your statement of "Gravity's attractive force will never be stronger than the electrostatic forces that hold the particles apart" is wrong with the simple idea of fusion. And the gravitational force in Accretion discs is already strong enough to over come electrostatic forces, not to mention how many magnitudes over gravity will increase as you get closer to these massive objects.
Wow. So wrong on so many levels. Gravity does not exert a force via any sort of particle according to general relativity. It is a geometric deformation of spacetime.
You have no idea what you are talking about.
To clarify: If MBHs from cosmic rays destroy astronomical bodies routinely enough that we should be worried, then we should expect to observe at least a decent number of black holes with masses below the Chandrasekhar limit (1.4 solar masses), simply because there are plenty of stars (like our sun) with masses below that limit. It appears, based on the spectrum of masses that we have been able to observe, that stellar mass black holes form via gravitational collapse, and specifically not through consumption by micro black holes. HTH.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
The sun won't ever go black hole because there's not enough mass to overcome the electron repulsion between iron atoms.
The sun isn't big enough to become a supernova either, since the remains of the star AFTER burning all the fusion products would have to be heavier than the sun is NOW (and it will lose mass as it reaches red giant stage).
And since the earth would orbit further away if the sun were lighter but the total energy (gravitational potential + kinetic) were the same for the earth, there's a good chance the earth would spiral out as the sun loses mass into its red giant phase and not get burned inside the sun's larger atmosphere, even though that would extend beyond the current orbit of the earth.
And there's no such thing as "drag" as you describe it. Photon pressure is about 1.6 pounds per square meter at 1 AU. Total force on the earth would be ~2 million pound force. Since the earth weighs 10^21lbs, the acceleration would naff all.
So, no, an object put at earth's position with a sun that was dead (solid iron is the only option, but even if it were a black hole, the idea is the same) it wouldn't collapse in because there's no decay in the orbit.
You've watched Disney's "The Black Hole" and thought it was a documentary, I think.
There's no such theory as one your message proposes someone else to have thought up.
We've got one of the best particle accelerators around (the Sun/Sol) and it hasn't managed to snuff us out yet and it's had BILLIONS of years. The LHC doesn't even come close in power levels comparatively speaking.
Actually that's not true. Basic fusion in the Sun's interior produces particles on the order of 1-20 MeV. These particles in cases when they reach the surface of the Sun can be accelerated by the Sun's magnetic fields, in extreme cases up to around 10 GeV. In comparison, the particle streams of the LHC will be colliding at energies of 10 TeV and up. That's particles with energies three orders of magnitude greater than the most energetic particles coming from the Sun.
All of that is dwarfed by ultra-high energy cosmic rays. One was observed to have an energy of roughly 3*10^8 TeV. Yes, that's almost seven orders of magnitude greater energy than what's going on in the LHC. Imagine a bunch of those whacking a neutron star for millions of years. The surface of a neutron star has a density about 5 to 6 orders of magnitude greater than iron. The interior apparently can be another 8 orders of magnitude, if our models are correct. That's as good an environment for a micro black hole as anything you'll find in nature. Yet we have neutron stars that have been around for at least 100,000 years. My bet is that with improved gravity lensing observations, they'll find more of these ancient neutron stars.
Short answer: because the escape velocity is greater than the speed of light inside the Schwartzschild radius, matter cannot travel outwards, but also cannot stay stationary (to prove this properly you need some fairly complex general relativity). Because of this it can only head towards the centre of mass, so the matter all converges on a single point. As the escape velocity only increases as one gets closer to the centre, this forces all the matter into a single point of spacetime, the singularity.
This is, at least, what general relativity tells us. However, it's impossible to know for sure, as one of the properties of black-holes is that it is considered impossible for information to escape the event horizon.
Granted, and definitely interesting, but you could only get out the amount of energy the black-hole has stored in angular momentum. For a microscopic black-hole this would be insignificant.
"what does blue sound like?"
Blue sounds like seven. Didn't anyone tell you?
should ALSO be worried that clicking your heels together three times and saying, "There's no place like home" will turn you into a bowl of cornflakes
...well, I got bettah.
A lot of people have trouble understanding arguments like yours that start with an "extreme" circumstance to show that there are at least some bounds. I'm not great at explaining my arguments, but you have to break it down to a basic level for many people.
Possibility #4. Micro Black holes created in the upper atmosphere dissipate (not "evaporate", btw) quickly because of a different set of unaccounted variables (ie: the environment of the upper atmosphere)
Thinking that one understands all the variables in an experiment is a dangerous game. Chaos is everywhere.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
but what if the neutron stars are just painted on the ceiling?
you know, i think you actually could reproduce the 'sound' 'blue' makes, with the right equipment. if you consider blue to be the frequency of light that is reflected off of 'blue' objects, and you take that frequency, and reproduce it mechanically, that is to say, vibrate a speaker at that frequency, (somehow) you'd get, abet terribly far outside the range of human hearing, the 'sound' of 'blue'.
it'd probably annoy the hell out of dogs.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
There's the theory that electrons (and other fundamental particles) are black holes. They have no structure, so they are point masses, which automatically makes them black holes. (They don't evaporate because they have charge.)
Oh, definitely. I dread to think of the control that would be needed to fire a beam of electrons against a femtometre-sized black hole's spin and then, somehow, extract energy from, err, whatever's left of the beam. I was reading through Carroll's notes again earlier and read a bit I'd forgotten, you can only at the very most recover 29% of a black hole's energy like that, or a similar number. The rest will always be in its mass. (And electric fields etc.)
I should have emphasised the word "strictly" to make it clear I was being a pedant :)
Perhaps if the holes were charged we could do electronics with tiny little charged black holes. Perhaps not...
So we are trying to investigate something we don't fully understand yet, using experiments never done before, looking for forces of nature never observed like this before, but on a theoretical basis we can say with certainty that there are no safety risks.
Hmmm. I remember accidents happening during the Manhattan project.
OMG Ponies!, err, Bunnies!
Actually it's freshman-level physics.
General relativity and quantum mechanics are freshman level physics? Wow. You sure went to a fancier school than I did!
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
In more serious terms, in case anyone believes the parent in spite of its +4 Funny mod:
Obviously the branching universes only happen based on things that are actually possible. There are no branches from me making my morning coffee that result in the destruction of Earth, or unicorns wandering into my yard, or anything like that.
Since the LHC *can't* destroy the earth, no LHC startup attempts are spinning off destroyed-Earth branches.
I'm not sure why you were modded as troll, but you do need to use different formulas when you are talking about speeds close to speed of light. Please start reading from here, it should explain: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity-addition_formula#Special_theory_of_relativity
The Face on Mars people didn't just insist that the new photos were of a different location and we were just told it was the face to stop people from asking questions?
Amateurs.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Thank you for opening my eyes to the wall-bunny threat.. I think we need to start preparing for this. I propose pre-emptive legislation. Three-strikes ought to do it. Three strikes is all anyone deserves, after all!
LHC would sure be one of the more hilarious ways to die. A worse case scenario (i.e .scientists made a mistake that leads to end of the world) reminds me a little of that Monty Python skit where someone writes down the ultimate joke. This joke is so potent anyone that reads it instantly dies of laugher. Of course the moment someone finds a body they're curious about what's written on the piece of paper next to it. (thus the bodies start accumulating)
It's 13.7 billion years ago in some other universe. Some intelligent alien beings are curious to understand how the universe started. They build a machine call the LHB to see if they can simulate condition of the original big bang....
Imagine how much it would suck to be a life form on Earth a few billion years from now, and learn that your planet is in danger of being consumed by a black hole because some ancient creatures thought it would be a cool experiment to leave it there...
The existence of a Schwartzchild radius assumes that gravity can ever be stronger than the repulsive forces within the nucleus. It cannot. Both increase simultaneously as you increase mass. Gravity's attractive force will never be stronger than the electrostatic forces that hold the particles apart.
To create a small black hole you don't need to overcome the repulsive forces (which are primarily Pauli Exclusion and not electrostatic) indefinitely. You only need to overcome them for an instant.
It need not be gravity which overcomes said forces, either.
If you fire a bunch of high energy particles at each other such that they are within their mutual Schwartzchild radius you'd get a black hole.
You might think that Pauli Exclusion would push everything apart. It does, in a sense -- but space curves in towards the singularity faster than *any* repulsion can act! The entire point of GR is that you need to think of gravitation as a geometric thing and not a force.
I always knew they were coming for us!! The Large Hare Creator has begun it's final spawning stage. The end is nigh! A furry end to us all. Who would've thought.
Apparently -1 Troll is the new Disagree mod.
And here I thought it was just -1 Overrated that filled that niche. I guess I stepped on some toes.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
nowhere does the theory say that a massive object has been accelerated to the speed of light. What the theory actually says is that null geodesics (which massless particles travel along) are trapped within the event horizon
Acceleration due to gravity is mass-irrelevant.
A massless particle will accelerate at the same rate a massive one will.
Galileo, Pisa, etc.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
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Quantum Mechanics Feed @ Feed Distiller
Errrr, yes. Thank you. Your "point" has absolutely nothing to do with what I wrote. What I wrote is that "nowhere does the theory say that a massive object has been accelerated to the speed of light". Your apparent counter-argument is "Acceleration due to gravity is mass-irrelevant".
That's just rephrasing the equivalence principle -- which is a fundamental cornerstone of general relativity and absolutely nothing to do with my statement, and even less to do with the rest of my points. I'm going to be forced to conclude that you're not only trolling but also can't or won't understand what I've said, because in no way does the equivalence principle undermine black holes. Exactly the opposite, given that the equivalence principle leads to general relativity, which leads to black holes.
You can derive the Schwartzchild radius using newtonian physics like clone53421 is claiming, and if that was what people were basing the existence of black holes on, then clone would be right. But it is just an accident that this derivation works.
If you do the derivation properly, using general relativity, you get the same result for the Schwartzchild radius. Though there are some interesting differences in how "radius" is defined in general relativity.
So, I'm sorry that the only derivation you saw was the incorrect classical physics one (which is used to motivate the result using simple math), but the answer is still true. But honestly, if you really thought that you were the first person to realize this problem with the derivation-- that none of the thousands of physicists to learn it since it was derived had noticed this glaringly obvious problem, then you are a monumental fool.
It one micro black hole is not enough we shall create a thousand...if it can be done it will be done
You can derive the Schwartzchild radius using newtonian physics like clone53421 is claiming, and if that was what people were basing the existence of black holes on, then clone would be right. But it is just an accident that this derivation works.
If you do the derivation properly, using general relativity, you get the same result for the Schwartzchild radius. Though there are some interesting differences in how "radius" is defined in general relativity.
Wow, am I the only one who had a Foundation moment?
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Gravitational collapse can do work. The usual example is to consider the collapse of a spherical mass whose outer surface is connected to ropes which in turn connect to electric generators. Collapse tugs the rope towards the centre of the sphere, causing a rotation in the generator, leading to the production of electricity.
Letting anything fall in a gravitational potential gradient does work; by the equivalence principle in GR, gravitation is an acceleration.
The energy to heat the particles comes from the acceleration; acceleration imparts energy; the acceleration comes from the mass-energy of the black hole creating a gravitational potential gradient in which the particles fall.
It is much much less friction than compressive heating (and some inverse compton scattering) that is the reason the gasses near a black hole are hot.
The interaction cross section of a black hole is proportional to the r term in the Schwartzchild solution for the black hole; for radiuses larger than that of a neutral atom, an accretion disk will form in any gas with reasonable pressure. Microscopic black holes have minuscule radiuses that are much smaller than those of free nucleons, and so an accretion could only happen in a very hot and dense fluid (that also must be hotter than the Hawking evaporation temperature of the MBH).
The argument goes like this: There are plenty of cosmic rays which impact our atmosphere, the other planets in the solar system, the sun, other stars, everything, with energies across a huge spectrum, including LHC energies. Either the LHC will produce MBH or it will not. If it will, then cosmic rays also produce MBH, and do so without destroying any of the things we can see in the sky, so MBH from the LHC would similarly not destroy the earth. If the LHC will not produce MBH, then we have nothing to worry about in that regard anyway.
This argument works for just about any Earth destroying LHC scenario, except, I suppose, the time traveling killer Higgs ;)
Maybe thats where all the dark matter came from.