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.

Comments

Re:What's your definition of possible

[Kingrames]

Perhaps a new unit of measurement to quantify possibility?
I nominate "the Bullshit."

We'd have to come up with some landmark positions to establish scale:

"When someone asks you how you're doing and you say "fine." That's 1 bullshit. They don't care.
When someone asks you about avatar and you say you saw it with your girlfriend, that's 10 bullshits, cause you post on slashdot.
When you say that 2010 will be the year of linux on the desktop, that's somewhere between 10^6 and 10^9 bullshits.

TO: Whom it may concern;

[budgenator]

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?