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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.
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.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
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.
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
This can be explained very simply.
Shutting down the LHC will not inconvenience these people in the least.
Telling them not to use their SUV to drive to the corner store all the time, or to use it for a one person long distance commute to work will inconvenience them.
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.
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.