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

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.

Comments

Tiny black holes

[rossdee]

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

Re: Tiny black holes

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe what you are trying to say is:

"God will not let us destroy his creation."

Re:Tiny black holes

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if they didn't, the rate at which they could consume the planet is miniscule. The Earth would be long-gone before the black hole had any appreciable effect.

http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/our-solar-system/39-our-solar-system/the-earth/other-catastrophes/54-how-long-would-it-take-for-a-mini-black-hole-to-eat-the-earth-advanced

Re: Tiny black holes

[Christian Smith]

D'oh, incorrect mod!

Re: Tiny black holes

[Archangel Michael]

I am not a theologian, but because you can't fathom it, doesn't mean it doesn't have an alternative answer.

But lets take a quick look at possibilities. Man creates fancy cancer causing agent, lets call it ... agent orange. Did God create cancer?

Or put it in another way, "God allows evil, because without a choice, there is no chance to choose"

ON the other hand, you being human and being your own god have to answer for the evil you allow to exist. Oh wait, being an atheist, you cannot even say evil exists. Everything is situational and you have plenty of excuses as to why you allow "evil" in your life. And don't lie to me saying you don't allow evil, even by your own standards, you allow it. Which makes you pretty hypocritical.

Re: Tiny black holes

[aardvarkjoe]

the GP to which I was responding was basically trolling.

No, the GP was making a joke. You saw the word "God" and immediately threw an off-topic temper tantrum.

Re: Tiny black holes

[ScentCone]

I am not a theologian

Obviously. Otherwise you'd be trotting out the much more polished responses that trained theologians use to try to explain the all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving, but unspeakably mean and petty God scenario. Professional theologians and similar shamans have a lot more practice and selling that concept than you do. Clearly:

Man creates fancy cancer causing agent, lets call it ... agent orange. Did God create cancer?

Are you sticking with the all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving god model? Well, since you're sticking with pure invented fantasy, that's actually a trick question, isn't it? But since that god is involved in every aspect of creation, then: yes. And even if you don't like that answer, there's the fact that despite is apparently boundless mercy and his ability to make otherwise physically impossible things happen (including bringing people back from the dead during publicity stunts), he really doesn't are if pure-as-the-driven-snow innocent infants (and millions of other people) die in agony after months of suffering. Who cares if man is capable of inducing cancer. Are you proposing that ALL such horrible fates, including every way in which a toddler can be made ill and prematurely die in misery is the result of human action? No? I see.

Or put it in another way, "God allows evil, because without a choice, there is no chance to choose"

I see. So, things like childhood bone cancer, or being born with a major heart defect, etc., is just people choosing. OK.

ON the other hand, you being human and being your own god have to answer for the evil you allow to exist. Oh wait, being an atheist, you cannot even say evil exists.

You really are new at this, aren't you? Are you actually saying that the only measuring stick for evil is that which a particular bronze-age desert tribe or two jotted down, and had re-hashed by people centuries later for political reasons? That only people who follow that recipe are allowed to objectively weigh someone's actions as evil? Hint: it's possible to objectively define a value system (which then allows you to separate things into good and evil) without even once having to invoke magical invisible all-powerful but part-time and petty gods. In fact, it's a lot EASIER to define a rational code of ethics/morals if you're NOT using made of fairly tales as the basis for them, philosophically. Why? Because that way you don't have to paint over all of the BS mixed premises, loopholes, and please-don't-look-behind-the-curtain nonsense that comes with basing your value system on imaginary magic.

And don't lie to me saying you don't allow evil, even by your own standards, you allow it. Which makes you pretty hypocritical.

Have you poured your nice strawman a cup of coffee yet this morning? He's probably getting tired.

Re: Tiny black holes

[ScentCone]

Right. So we're back to God being a deliberately cruel SOB, since he allows another (less powerful than him) supernatural being to kill children as part of his little laboratory experiment. Pretty cool.

Re: Tiny black holes

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh wait, being an atheist, you cannot even say evil exists.

Not sure where you got that idea. Bigotry aside, evil exists in the same way beauty exists.

Re: Tiny black holes

[penguinoid]

Man creates fancy cancer causing agent, lets call it ... agent orange. Did God create cancer?

All those "carcinogenic" substances you hear about don't cause cancer -- they increase the rate of mutation, which wouldn't ever cause cancer if the cells were better designed. To put it another way, if people didn't naturally get cancer it would be almost impossible to design a substance that would give them cancer. If an engineer had designed human DNA, then that engineer would be blamed if random mutagens would routinely cause cancer -- that's why we have fail-safes and error-correcting code. Human cells also have fail-safes and error correcting code, but they're poorly designed.

Just as an example, the naked mole rat has additional fail-safes and so is almost immune to cancer.

Re: Tiny black holes

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's all pray for his immortal soul.

Re: Tiny black holes

[KGIII]

I shall do my scientific chanting...

Ohm... Ohm... Ohm...

Do no not resist!

Maybe it's just me, but...

[andyring]

I welcome our new microscopic black hole overlords!

Re:Maybe it's just me, but...

[93 Escort Wagon]

Quit sucking up to them already.

I hate blacknoses.

Scaremongering.

[locofungus]

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.

Re:Scaremongering.

[DoctorNathaniel]

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.)

Re:Scaremongering.

[DoctorNathaniel]

Yes, exactly.

The thing you're probably not aware of is that cosmic rays can be very high energy - recorded cosmic ray interactions have single-particle energies many magnitudes larger than the most powerful accelerators ever constructed. (I think the biggest recorded is around 3 Joules of energy in a single proton.) The LHC collision energies are comparable to a very common set of interactions from cosmic rays. And there's lots of cosmic rays, and they've been colliding with the earth for millennia without turning us into a black hole. Right now the number of interactions in the LHC per second is far less than the rate in the atmosphere.

Did they check their math?

[AltGrendel]

You have to divide by zero when working with black holes.

Yes,

[azav]

They evaporate first before eating the entire universe.

Quite polite of them, I must say.

Their age estimate is wrong

[Muad'Dave]

That barrier is so big that it would likely take many, many times the age of the universe for the transition to occur.

No, it will take exactly one "age of the Universe" to tunnel and cause the collapse.

Any universe in which high energies could...

[Viol8]

... destroy it due to local laws of physics would be destroyed at the moment of their formation when the energies tend to infinity. This may well have happened in the past (if you believe in the eternal inflation-collapse universe theory) or be happening (if you believe the multiverse theory) but since our universe is still here after 14 billion years I think its a safe bet that the laws of physics here don't allow it.

Re:uncountable cosmic rays havent down this yet

[war4peace]

Did a black hole mangle your writing style?