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Prospects and Limits For the LHC's Capabilities To Test String Theory

StartsWithABang writes: The Large Hadron Collider has just been upgraded, and is now making the highest energy collisions of any human-made machine ever. But even at 13 TeV, what are the prospects for testing String Theory, considering that the string energy scale should be up at around 10^19 GeV or so? Surprisingly, there are a number of phenomenological consequences that should emerge, and looking at what we've seen so far, they may disfavor String Theory after all.

2 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. Re:One quote from the article that is nice... by Coren22 · · Score: 4, Informative

    More energetic collisions happen in the upper atmosphere all the time when cosmic rays enter. If there was concern of black holes eating the earth, it would already have happened.

    Here's some great camera footage at the LHC for you if you are really concerned:

    http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lh...

    --
    APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
  2. a microscopic black hole won't hurt you by ericbg05 · · Score: 4, Informative

    "The production of tiny black holes is one of the predictions. "
    Man I hope they know what they are doing.

    Microscopic black holes disappear quickly due to Hawking radiation. So if your goal is to destroy the earth, creating a microscopic black hole is not the way you want to go.

    The bigger a black hole is, the more slowly it evaporates. So if you want your black hole to do any damage, it'll have to be more than a certain threshold size. Turns out that minimum-size black hole you'll need to destroy Earth is roughly the mass of Mt Everest.

    If we take the density of such a black hole to be 3 * 10^18 kg/m^3, then our black hole will look like a ball with a radius of about 12 cm, i.e. it looks like a soccer ball.*

    See here for more details.

    * no idea if my density assumption is reasonable. I'm not a physicist -- I got the number from 20 seconds of googling. The volume of your black hole may vary.