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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!
a) a black hole created in a particle accelarator would evaporate too quickly to be dangerous
b) the energies that LHC is producing are a LOT smaller than the energies that a lot of cosmic rays have when they hit earth. it's a lot of energy for man, but not for nature, actually quite common. While you were reading this comment, a couple of particles with this energy PASSED THROUGHT YOU
c) don't panic
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.
basically what the TFA is saying is that if you put a lot of energy in a very small spot, you get a black hole...
in other words:
E=mc
+
high mass density = black hole
Nothing to see here, move along
PS: IAAP
Oh dear... that means a violin might cause the apocalypse?
I don't see how you can prove something conclusively in silico, you put in what you know and you get a distillation of it out. How can you discover* completely new physics when the computer can only start with a potentially incorrect/inaccurate theory and make deterministic calculations based on that input? I mean, you can't get out more than you put in, can you?
Caveat: I can easily accept that collisions of the same energy take place all the time in nature, even if a hole were somehow formed I have far more confidence in Hawking than someone who can scream "Think of the Children!!!" while keeping a straight face.
*There's no reason why you can't put in your theory and come out with a simulation that doesn't resemble how things happen in nature and so begin to disprove a theory. That being said, if CERN could have shown the existence of the Higgs boson using only simulations then they might not have bothered with the LHC.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
easily possible with an Infinite Improbability Drive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_in_The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Infinite_Improbability_Drive
The mass will be the rest mass of both colliding particles + the kinetic energy they both have (a couple of TeV).
It won't even have the energy of a grain of salt. It will have the energy of about 1 helium atom.
I think Disaster Area was more into thermonuclear electric guitars.
It's amazing how so many people who never passed a high school science class (or their schools 'science' class hadn't gone past basic atomic structure) are utterly afraid of crackpot doomsday predictions about something scientific that they don't even have the faintest inkling of comprehension of, while all the experts in that field aren't afraid or worried in the slightest.
(Now there's a run-on sentence.)
Of course those scientist don't say it's impossible, though my understanding is that it's probability of destroying the earth is a bit less than that of a winged monkey to fly out your ass leading a miniature brass band.
Funny thing about all those colossal energies involved, on the cosmic scale, they don't even qualify as peanut crumbs. If they do produce a black hole (of the extremely miniature variety), it's lifespan will be horrendously short, it's event horizon freaking minuscule, and at that scale the distance to the nearest thing to gobble (assuming it can actually suck it in) is the equivalent of light years away. It's just not going to be a threat. 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. There are an uncountable number of energy events that far exceed the LHCs energy levels around us constantly, and if you want the really big ones, just point your telescope pretty much anywhere in space and you'll be pointing at several. If that kind of stuff has been going on for billions of years, and we haven't gone poof yet, you're better off buying a flying monkey proof undies than worrying about calling the LHC the 5th horseman.
While this very well could be true, I'd just like to point out that a computer simulation is no substitute for an actual experiment.
Also, while I'm no expert in the subject of string theory, if one could reach the Plank energy, wouldn't it then be possible to find these supposed strings about which everyone's been talking?
Because I have several computer models that predict what I should trade to become fabulously wealthy. Excellent!
But someone, Einstein's other work, general relativity, that does result in infinities is assumed to be true. I was thinking we would have this fixed by now, and 2001-2010 would be as productive as 1901-1910. Perhaps the year 2000 was the beginning of a little dark age,and will have to wait a while for science to restart.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
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.
The Luddites that believe the LHC is going to destroy the Earth are really starting to get on my nerves. It is obvious even with a simplistic high-school level of understanding that any black holes formed by the LHC (if such a thing is even possible) are completely harmless. If we were to collide two protons with enough energy to produce a black hole, you would end up with (very temporarily) a black hole that has the mass (and thus gravitational pull) of two protons, with an electric charge of +2.
Let's take a look at a Helium atom. Helium nuclei are (usually) composed of two protons and two neutrons, thus they have roughly twice as much mass (and gravitational pull) as our aforementioned black hole. This nucleus also carries an electric charge of +2. That means that Helium nuclei exert more attractive force on their surroundings than the worst-case scenario black hole that can be produced by the LHC.
In the most extreme case, the closest that one of these miniature black holes would get to sucking in the matter around them would be to capture an electron or two into orbit around them in the same way as a Helium nuclei would, before the black hole evaporates. That would be quite an exciting, interesting, and completely harmless development.
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
For the record, those financial models were perfectly accurate. The data fed into them, however, was stupidly naive and optimistic, which isn't surprising, as the users of the models tweaked the data to get the results they wanted.
Or: Why you should blame the carpenter, not the hammer.
Gee, what's wrong with this sentence:
Now a computer model shows conclusively...
I'm sure the research modeling is interesting and worthwhile, and it's just the writeup that is idiotic. But y'know *computer* models do not ever show anything *conclusively*. The model is only as good as the assumptions that went into designing it. Those might be good and reasonable guesses, but you are only doing the model because you *haven't* (or can't) observe the actual phenomenon.
Buy Text Processing in Python
Our best theories suggest that if (and it's a big if) a black hole forms, it will evaporate in an instant.
We KNOW that much more powerful collisions occur all the time from cosmic rays. We also know that none of them have destroyed the Earth.
That, in turn, means either such black holes don't form even at much higher energies than we are anywhere near able to produce, or that they decay rapidly just as we theorize, or for some other reason it's nowhere near as bad as we think it could be.
There is no credible theory to even suggest that an LHC produced black hole would be any more problem than those produced naturally by cosmic radiation over the last few billion years.
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.
Correct me if I'm wrong as I'm not a high energy particle physicist, a particle's energy/mass would only exists at it's maximum along it's axis of velocity, m = mrest/ sqrt(1-v^2/c^2) and v is varied by the cosine of the angle of approach or the radial velocity therefore it is likely that a relativistic particle could have some collisions that would satisfied the conditions for a black-hole and some that did not simultaneously. We generally view a blackhole event horizon as a psychologically comfortable sphere, yet a relativistic blackholes event horizon would be shaped like an hour-glass.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I am more likely to trust a peer review from the guys at the LHC, when they talk about their research, than the IPCC folks, when they talk about theirs.
Both cause me puzzlement, since how can a (necessarily imperfect and incomplete) computer model conclusively prove anything???
Either the scientists have too much faith in their own genius, or the Science Now "journalist" doesn't know how to critically think.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
There a several of major problems with nano-black holes constructed from a few atoms:
(1) First is lifetime would be shorter than time it would take to interact with anything else.
(2) Its event horizon would be so small as to keep from interacting with most matter before it evaporated.
(3) Particles dont interact gravitationally in practice. Other atomic forces are 38 or more magnitudes larger.
I wouldnt be surprised if existing colliders and cosmic rays routinely make black holes. We just dont see these very tiny ones.
saw one that said "Bad Wolf"
rewriting history since 2109
A helium atom has a mass of roughly 4 GeV/c2. The current lower limit on Black Holes at colliders is 1 TeV, or about 250 times more energy so it will have far, far more energy than a Helium atom.
It is a mathematical discovery about the properties of the equations that we think describe the particle behavior. Assuming their math was correct, it is a mathematical discovery like any other, but in a highly limited area (this specific set of equations). Whether it is a mathematical discovery that is also a description of physical reality depends on whether those equations actually describe particle behavior at those energy levels, which we don't yet know.