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Tiny Black Holes Could Trigger Collapse of Universe—Except That They Don't

Posted by Soulskill on from the less-than-comforting-reasoning dept.

sciencehabit writes: If you like classic two-for-one monster movies such as King Kong vs. Godzilla, then a new paper combining two bêtes noires of pseudoscientific scaremongers—mini black holes and the collapse of the vacuum—may appeal to you. Physicists working with the world's biggest atom-smasher—Europe's Large Hadron Collider (LHC)—have had to reassure the public that, even if they can make them, mini black holes, infinitesimal version of the ones that form when jumbo stars implode, won't consume the planet. They've also had to dispel fears that blasting out a particle called the Higgs boson will cause the vacuum of empty space to collapse. Now, however, three theorists calculate that in a chain reaction, a mini black hole could trigger such collapse after all.

3 of 156 comments (clear)

  1. Tiny black holes by rossdee · · Score: 5, Informative

    Tiny black holes don't stick around for long due to the quantum uncertainty around the event horizon
    See Hawking Radiation

  2. Scaremongering. by locofungus · · Score: 4, Informative

    There's nothing that the LHC (or any other conceivable accelerator that we could build at current technology levels) can do that the sun isn't already doing in the upper atmosphere (or in the centre of the sun)

    What the LHC brings is doing the collisions in a small, controllable space where it's (relatively) easy to measure what is happening.

    --
    God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
    1. Re:Scaremongering. by DoctorNathaniel · · Score: 5, Informative

      Not true. The collision energies in the sun are on the order of a few MeV - there's lots of them, but none at the TeV scale.

      However, you're right it's scaremongering: cosmic rays interact in the atmosphere at LHC energies all the time: same kinds of particles, same energy (and higher!) at a rate that's much higher than the LHC collisions, once you add up the entire globe. If high-energy p-p collisions caused a problem, the earth would have blown up long ago. Or Jupiter. Or all of the stars in the universe.

      So, it's pretty safe to assume that the LHC isn't doing anything that can possibly hurt us; it's going on already. (It's just not going on in the middle of a high-resolution particle tracker.)