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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.
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 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.
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.
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!
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
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.
Not true, or at least not the way you mean. Each of the protons going into the collision carries its rest mass, but also the extra mass due to the fact it's moving at almost light-speed. In the case of the LHC this is about 10000 times greater, so you end up with a black hole with the mass of roughly 20002 protons (and, indeed charge +2).
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.
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Not true either. At the energies the LHC will collide, not the protons collide, but the constituent quarks and gluons. In fact, when producing very massive objects, it will be the quarks constituting the proton, the so-called valence quarks, that interact; gluons and the so-called sea-quarks are extremely unlikely to reach those energies. So you would end up with some fractional charge. A detail, maybe, but as an LHC physicist, I like things correct :-).
The comparison to the helium atom is wrong too: helium ions, stripped of their electrons, exert quite an electrical pull on their surroundings. But usually they very quickly recombine into neutral helium atoms. Or they have to be accelerated such that their kinetic energy is to large to form a stable atom.
Finally, the comment about the mass of the moving proton is plain wrong too. The only thing that matters to calculate the gravitational pull of the created object is it's rest mass. The relativistic mass that is being referred depends on the frame of reference (and is therefore an uninteresting quantity we never really work with). Imagine the force being dependent on the frame of reference...
That all being said, I agree the whole apocalyptic story is plain stupid, but as scientists we cannot afford using wrong arguments. And we need better PR maybe, because a 1/quintillion (or whatever probability limit set) is maybe not zero, but should be rounded down as such for public dissemination.
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
Now this is a part I find interesting, and I don't think I've ever read a serious treatment of it. Collide two protons at CERN and create a black hole of mass (2*proton mass + collision energy), and charge +2e. You now have an extreme Reissner-Nordstrom black hole, whose electric charge predominates over its gravitational field. Are we looking at a naked singularity here?
Or if not; even so, let the charged black hole interact with matter nearby. It approaches some atomic matter in the wall of the particle accelerator. The first thing it encounters is the electron cloud that forms the surface of the wall. Now, does it swallow electrons into its event horizon? Unlikely. Surely instead it will pull the electrons into orbit about itself, like any other particle? You'd get a black hole with two electrons orbiting it, it would look like a rather overweight helium atom. And that would be the end of it. So its nucleus has an event horizon, what of it? Nothing approaches the nucleus because it's shielded by the electrons.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.