Slashdot Mirror
Colliding Particles Can Make Black Holes After All
cremeglace writes with this excerpt from ScienceNOW:
"You've heard the controversy. Particle physicists predict the world's new highest-energy atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, might create tiny black holes, which they say would be a fantastic discovery. Some doomsayers fear those black holes might gobble up the Earth — physicists say that's impossible — and have petitioned the United Nations to stop the $5.5 billion LHC. Curiously, though, nobody had ever shown that the prevailing theory of gravity, Einstein's theory of general relativity, actually predicts that a black hole can be made this way. Now a computer model shows conclusively for the first time that a particle collision really can make a black hole."
That said, they estimate the required energy for creating a black hole this way to be roughly "a quintillion times higher than the LHC's maximum"; though if one of the theories requiring compact extra dimensions is true, the energy could be lower.
The Large Hardon Collider, to be turned on tomorrow, is designed to pump various types of hardon up to huge energies before banging them together. However, many concerned citizens without the personal experience or understanding of what hardons do worry at the idea of the large hardons being sucked deep into a black hole.
The device will push large, energised hardons through a ring repeatedly, faster and faster, as smoothly and tightly as possible, until they clash and spray matter in all directions. "It's nothing that cosmic rays don't do all the time all over the place," reassured a particularly buff scientist. "It's perfectly right and natural."
Low-energy hardon physics and the temperature dependence of hardon production are well understood, as is the process of a hardon smoothly entering the nucleus. But some question what may happen at greater, hotter energies.
Church leaders have come out at the device. "They're the same polarity!" said Pope Palpatine XVI. The Church worries that strange matter may recruit normal matter and turn it strange.
The Large Hardon Collider was to launch in May, but this has been delayed. "I'm so sorry," stammered a scientist, "this has never happened to us before."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
A quintillion times higher than the LHC?
Might I suggest that we not use the word possible to mean "as likely as your car turning into a pig and flying away".
Thanks!
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
Low-energy hardon physics and the temperature dependence of hardon production are well understood
Especially in the porn industry.
I suppose you could say...it doesn't matter.
~The roAm
"This would explain why people from the future are trying to stop "
No. The people from the future already know that it's impossible for LHC to create the black holes in question, as they have read this /. article.
U+F8FF
This means that if the earth collapses to a black hole, the extra dimensions exists. This is an incredible result that will most certainly boost confidence in string theory.
Oh dear... that means a violin might cause the apocalypse?
I think Disaster Area was more into thermonuclear electric guitars.
"it's" is a contraction of "it is", not a possessive.
Sorry, you were saying something funny about high school education?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Oh dear... that means a violin might cause the apocalypse?
That would be an untuned string. Violins are safe.
I think the conclusion that we can draw from this is that we'll be safe as long as we keep all 30-something-playing-20-something peroxide blondes with bad implants away from the LHC.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I'm a pornographic film maker and I have just registered a screen-play with the USPTO and the US Copyright office for a creative work titled "The Large hardon Collider"depicting two white nude male actors running around a ring for the purpose of jousting with their abnormally large, erect penises. When the actor collides his penis with the opposing actor he is assigned a point for the collision, the first actor to achieve 5 points wins the privilege of engaging in the sex scene with a black actress. Any talk or writings involving "large hardon collider" or "large hardon collisions" with or without blackholes is a serious violation of my IP rights. My legal team is at this moment is preparing litigation against the more grievous violater one "Anonymous Coward".
Seriously if newstechnica.com habitually misspells the word hadron, which is so fundemental to the topic of the article, how can anybody give them any credibility?
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Are you aware that the particles in the LHC are moving at ~= the speed of light?
They do a regex match on the speed of light?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
If something that like that could be created by these cosmically insignificant energy levels and actually survive long enough to eat planets, the universe would already be pretty darn empty.
You know, the universe *is* pretty darn empty.
I mean, you can't get out more than you put in, can you?
Well, it worked for my wife.