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The Big Bang Generator That Wasn't
ajs sent us a good investigative piece from the Boston Globe. Many of you recall the article about the Long Island particle accelerator that was going to try to replicate Big Bang conditions. Over the last three months, it's moved around the media, culminating with Fred Moody's scare piece about it, although the British Sunday Times recently picked it up yet again. The Globe article does a great job dissecting the actual facts behind the experiment and pokes fun at the growth of this Chicken Little-type story.
In Benford's vision, the universe created was seperate from ours, joined only by a "window" that exhibited itself as a mysterious black sphere about the size of a bowling ball, but massive. Most of the novel deals with the scientists solving the mystery of "what the hell is this thing?" Fun, hard, witty SF, with lots of scenes taking place in La Jolla, Pasadena, and Brookhaven.
Overall, very similar to Timescape, also by Benford. Also set at UCSD. Also about scientists. Also a great read.
I can see the fnords!
a committee of prominent physicists has also written a report, titled "Committee Report on Speculative "Disaster Scenarios" at RHIC". you can find it at http://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/rhicreport.html . you will find the three 'disaster' scenarios described there.
sorry, no black holes or strangelets!
patrick.
You said: "...and then build an entirely extra particle accelerator to funnel a beam of pure neutrons at your target."
Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not a particle physicist, but how would one accelerate neutrons?
Electrons: No problem, positive things atrract them, negative things repulse them.
Protons: Again no problem, just the inverse.
Neutrons: Dang! How the heck do you grab one of these things, anyway?
I know how neutrons can be generated by a nuclear reaction, etc., but fail to see how you could ever beam-ize the little turkeys once you've made them...
If this is possible, I'd love to know how it's done.
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
That said, the numbers are not just huge. They are many orders of magnitude beyond huge. For instance, the megaton/m^2 flux at Mars is enough energy to blow off an atmosphere as thick as Venus'. 1 megaton = 4.2e22 ergs = 4.2e15 joules.
Nope. The gravitational energy available goes as 1/r, so a full 50% of the total is available from only 2 radii out. The radius of a 1-earth-mass black hole is about 1 centimeter; everything is going to be falling in from more than twice that!- Even at the equator, an object sitting on the ground has only enough angular momentum to maintain a circular orbit around an earth-mass point at 1/64 of the radius of the Earth. And that's the best an object on Earth can do! Things at the poles would fall straight down if they were suddenly unsupported.
- Conversion efficiency is supposedly up to 50%. All the mass cramming into that accretion disk at a large fraction of c generates a heck of a lot of heat.
- The mini-BH would fall from the surface of the earth toward the core (if it could last long enough to get out of the lab, which it could not), and as it absorbed mass it would also absorb the momentum of that mass. Unless there is a transfer of momentum, the center of mass of the system would remain on the same path. This means that the mini-BH would very quickly wind up stationary at the center of the Earth.
- Earth isn't very big, and doesn't have a lot of angular momentum compared to a star of far greater dimensions. If something swallowed the core, the rest would fall inward just fine.
The black hole couldn't starve unless the accretion disk could transfer enough angular momentum outward to get the remaining mass into orbit. Without that, the inward pressure of the falling mass would only be balanced by radiation pressure from the accretion disk. Since an object on the equator only has the angular momentum to maintain a circular orbit at 1/64 of an Earth radius, at least 99.9996% of the Earth would be able to fall into the BH unless prevented by other mechanisms. The jets are driven by radiation pressure. The jets will also be there to scatter the energy radiated poleward from the accretion disk and allow it to hit objects behind the accretion disk. Remember, my calculations only assumed that 0.0001 of the total energy escaped as radiation toward the equator. The same conclusions hold pretty much even if you reduce that to 0.00000001. See my previous comment about scattering efficiency and losses. I didn't say that Mars would be knocked out of orbit, I implied that the side facing Earth would be pretty thoroughly fried (a megaton/m^2 will do that). I'm pretty certain now that both Mars and Venus would lose their atmospheres (maybe only half of Venus, if the event went quickly).Were it possible for this to happen, the Solar system would not be a healthy place to be that day. It would be best to be somewhere far away on vacation, and deal with the insurance agent upon your return. And hope you have a "full replacement planet" policy. ;-)
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
They mention "strange matter" a few times, with no explanation. I am but an engineer, and not very knowledgable about such things. But surely there is a theoretical physicist in the audience who could field this question, and enlighten the Slashdot readership. Please?
thanks,
--Lenny
Swain
Reucroft
The Sagan idea doesn't work with this. Even if the Earth became a black hole, there would be evidence of humans having existed. Earth would be a black hole with the same gravitational pull as it has now, just no size and an accessible event horizon.
It would be a black hole with a moon and satelites, some of them artificial.
And when physicists talk about "small but non-zero probablility" remember that there is a small but non-zero probability that a baseball-sized chunk of the Sun will appear on your desk within the next five minutes, due to quantum effects.
When these guys say "small", they mean it.
Fear my wrath, please, fear my wrath?
Homer
We apologize for the inconvenience.
- spun up from the contraction of its radius so that it achieves orbit, or
- blown off into a jet.
It'll find its way by gravitational attraction, and again you miss the point. It doesn't matter how many Schwarzchild radii that is; absolutely nothing on Earth could achieve an orbit farther out than that on its own angular momentum, so everything else would either be pushed into the BH by the pressure of the matter above it or blown off in one of the jets.About the best an object anywhere on the surface of Earth could do is to find an orbit at about 1/64 of its original radius (and that's the best). Since the volume of a sphere scales as r^3, chopping the radius of a sphere by 63/64 eliminates 262143/262144 of its volume. That's about 99.9996%.
I made no such assumption. I assumed only that any BH created at rest with respect to the surface of the earth would fall inward, and everywhere it went it would have plenty of matter to eat. As for the centrifugal potential, it would only make a difference if the angular momentum could not be dissipated against the matter further above. As angular momentum and energy are lost to friction, the matter spirals in. I have no idea. I've lost the equation for the evaporation rate of a BH, and since the Hawking radiation would tend to push things away the calculation is too complex for a simple discussion like this one. Now, if I were going for my PhD in physics I might do it as part of my thesis project, but I'm not. There's your error. You are assuming the matter is accreting from a thin disk (which is already in orbit). This assumption is not valid; it would be accreting from a nice, fat, spherical planet with a core of iron atoms at perhaps 10 grams/cc. To get to the thin-disk case, most of the planet would have to be either sucked down the BH or blown off in jets. Transfer of angular momentum outward works to give the remaining matter orbital velocity at a greater radius. It doesn't matter how small the Kerr radius is as long as there is a huge quantity of matter under pressure squeezing itself into the BH like water through a faucet. Ah. So you admit attempting to obfuscate the issue. Sorry, it doesn't win any points (or brew).Another model just occurred to me: the radiation pressure of the growing BH and its polar jets blows the remains of Earth into a boiling, seething mass of iron-silicate vapor. The heat from this melts the remaining artificial satellites and then coats them with molten goo, as well as stealing their angular momentum from gas drag and pulling them in to share the fate of their creators. The entire Moon gets coated in iron, which simultaneously obliterates all traces of Apollo and turns it into a shiny marble for the next several billion years. ;-)
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
...then I'd be worried :)
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
So...what I get from this, is that Slashdot as a community isn't really any more (or less) prone to knee-jerk reactions when someone trys to stir things up.
Werd.
It seems ~90% of Slashdot readers side with the scientists, but I wonder if there isn't a real concern here. This is something that you would have to be a scientist just to make a judgement on, though, so I suppose we are stuck with their discretion, whether we like it or not. Let's just hope that they aren't Mad Scientists!
--Lenny
As for the "seething ball of iron silicate" scenario, if energy could be transferred outward fast enough (say, from convection outside of the radiative zone) this would be possible, but you appear correct that this requires a rate of heat generation too high for a mini-BH to manage by accretion. Even if all of 3e-9 kg/sec was converted to energy, this would only yield 2.7e10 watts, or about the solar energy falling on 20 km^2 of the top of the atmosphere. A trifling amount. Next mystery: What would a decaying mini-BH (say, 1 million tons) do if it happened to be inside a planet when it went boom?
That was educational. Pitcher of Heineken?
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I'm not suggesting that everyone should panic about RHIC, but trying to write it off as old hat isn't the appropriate response either.
Most people should worry about a) heart disease, b) lung cancer, and c) an auto accident, in roughly that order. Since we all know that very few people give those very real dangers any thought at all ....
Actually, a lot of people do take these seriously. I, for example, do not drive a car in order to decrease everyone elses chance of (c), as I am a terrible driver.
The point in being concerned about small chances of global catastrophy is not that it's likely, it's that right now we have all of our eggs in one basket and we can't very well afford to go throwing rocks....
I don't think this one accelerator is a big deal, but the thought is important. Every day, we receive several gamma-ray emmisions from deep-space. Many of them do not seem to be associated with any detectable stellar phenomenon. What if these gamma-ray sources are what's left of some world where a researcher said "I don't *think* this will cause a kilogram of matter to totally convert"? I haven't done the math, so I don't know how much matter would have to convert before you saw the kind of gamma-ray emmisions that we detect, but I suspect it's much less than an earth-size planet....
These are important things to think about. Even if we decide that it's more important to discover the nature of the universe than to avoid a little risk, we should consider what risk it is that we're not avoiding.
Fred Moody is the mouth puppet for the Global Dominition Force who are paving the way for the Xian invasion. Stephen Reucroft and John Swain are paid apologists for the RHIC project but what they don't know is that RHIC is funded out of the CIA drug slush-fund by The World Government for the exact purposes of researching and developing a black hole doomsday device that can be used against the encroaching Xian fleet. We need these black holes to form a parabola shaped lattice that will be used as a net on the Xians. To spread the fear Fred Moody supports is basically yelling to the sky "I want a third arm so I can be a better worker in your intergalatic slave catering business!" We know RHIC will make black holes. We just don't know if it it will be enough.
-no broken link
- The creation of runaway black holes. It is true, if you cram enough matter into a small enough volume, you may reach the density required to form a Schwarzchild-like (or, if you put some English on the particles, and some charge, Kerr-Newman) black hole. However, the Chicken Littles who worried so intensely about this phenonmenon failed to account for something simple: Hawking radiation, that is, black holes evaporate. The larger the black hole, the slower the evaporation, in contradiction to common sense. Little-bitty holes go "poof!" in a flash of radiation and heavy particles. Anyway, the aforementioned CLs (Chicken Littles) failed to do a calculation out of, say, _Black Holes: The Membrane Paradigm_, in the section under "Evaporation of Black Holes In A Thermal Bath." It's basic differential equations, not that bad. I haven't gone through them myself, but I don't exactly sweat the announced end of the world, either.
- Strange matter. A very, very hypothetical possible byproduct (and from where they get the idea that it might be produced, I don't know) of certain collisions between selected particles would produce "strangelets," that is, baryonic matter like our nuclei, but with a non-zero strangeness (a quark property). Add hypothetical to hypothetical, strangelets can convert normal matter to strangelets and dump off energy. Again, the fear of a chain reaction. Once again, they overlooked the fact that strangelets only convert free neutrons. They can't even convert neutrons inside nuclei. Now, with a mean lifetime of approximately one thousand seconds, you just don't have a lot of free neutrons floating around. You'd have to work to create these hypothetical strangelets, hope that you'd get the conversion, and then build an entirely extra particle accelerator to funnel a beam of pure neutrons at your target. Not bloody likely.
Since most of the people doing the Chicken Little routine have doctorates, they should be ashamed. All of the data I have mentioned arises from my occasional prowls through the Web on odd topics and not much more than a light understanding of black holes. No good excuse exists for their collective oversight, and one might almost imagine that it is deliberate. "No such thing as bad publicity," goes the cliche, and I'm fairly sure that most of the remarks were made by second-raters with flagging careers who would like a little extra grant money.Basic lesson in probability here. If an event has probability zero, it will never occur. Ever.
If anyone ever told you an event had probability zero and it did occur, they were an idiot.
Sorry, this will probably be rated as flamebait, but I can't stand when people who don't understand probability and statistics write it off as bullshit simply because they don't understand.
I strongly recommend the book Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos to anyone who has a problem with statistics. Maybe it won't teach you the subject in great detail, but it WILL show you how easily you can be ripped off by not understanding statistics. (Good read even if you think you already know.)
Sorry about the rant, but I come from a profession where manipulation and fabrication of figures (as is done by marketers to attract the public) would quickly end any prospects of future employment.
As we begin to control greater energies, we seem to be entering a time when some scientific experiments will entail small, but non-zero, risk to people in the area, maybe even to humanity at large.
How small of a probability of disaster does it take before we can justify a certain amount of risk, and how do we estimate the probability of disaster without a large number of trials?
For instance: IIRC, pre-Challenger the official estimates on the Space Shuttle having a fatal accident were supposed to be something like one in a million. (My copy of What Do You Care What Other People Think? is at home, feel free to correct me on the real number.) How do you get that estimate? Best way would be to launch a million times and see what happens, but that's hardly practical. Instead it was based on engineering knowledge of well-understood physical principals, materials, and techniques. But it was completely wrong, extrapolation on top of extrapolation without even a propagation of errors. How much worse are our chances of predicting the risks of new techniques, new materials, even new physics?
Of course, the fine and noble folks onboard the shuttle knew that there was a risk, and volunteered to take it. What about "innocent" bystanders? The probability of a fatal accident during the Cassini launch or flyby may have been one in a million (or, it may have been much greater - NASA's "Cassini Mission False and True" says "the navigation accuracy of NASA spacecraft is better than 20 km." Or is that 20 miles?), but it was never non-zero. No launch has a non-zero risk - there's some small chance of a chain of malfunctions that crashes the thing into someone's house. How small do we have to get the risk to justify the experiment?
I'm not going to lose any sleep over the Brookhaven work - given what we know about cosmic rays, I'd say the risk is greater that I'll be hit by a metorite than that there will be any problems there. But the questions of risk to the public will remain.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Even if this collider could create a small black hole it wouldn't be a problem.
All black holes undergo a quantum mechanical equivilant of evaporation. The smaller they are, the quicker they evaporate their contents into the visible universe as radiation. The basic idea behind the theory is quantum tunneling. If you compress something into a very very small volume, and as the volume approaches the Plank scale, the probability that particles trapped (in the classical sense) inside this volume can exist outside it will increase. This happens because the Debroglie wavelength of the particles doesn't change.
Now, in order to create a black hole with the small ammount of matter inside the collider, you would be looking at a Shwartzchild radius in the Plank scale. Somewhere in the order of 10^-30 m. (Maybe someone can check me on this with the approximation R=GM/c^2....this value may be too low).
Anyway, at this scale the black hole would vanish in an incredibly short period of time. Far too short to vacuum cleaner the Earth into a blackhole spacetime.
Large black holes on the other hand evaporate on scales greater than the age of the universe. Something on the order of > 10^100 years.
Bones, do you know what you've done ? Pretty soon they'll want a peice of OUR action !!!
Star Trek, "A Peice of the Action"
"It's all about access agent Spender." --The Smoking Man
In any case, the counterexamoke which was offered was invalid, because Challenger flew on account of bureaucrats ignring their engineers. The moral of the story is: listen to the scientists, ESPECIALLY if they say something's not safe.
Which could be construed as undermining your original argument. Still, when faced with scientist X saying it's safe, and scientist Y saying it isn't, you don't always have the grace of an easy decision. Not all the "engineers" were objecting to the launch. And the attitude at NASA was very much post hoc ergo propter hoc.
The point I'm trying to make is roughly: any bureaucrat/politician/careerist scientist may choose to demonstrate a 1 in 1^n probability of risk. But are they correct, or are they cooking the numbers? Do we assume that we know enough to calculate these things with necessary precision? Before Trinity (to return to your original example) there had been not a single nuclear explosion in all of human history. With no experimental data, how could the Manhattan Project experts who calculated the risk of "igniting the atmosphere" really be certain? They couldn't. They could make educated guesses, and they did, and fortunately they were right.
My deeper point here is that we are at a point in human capability where we can make things -- quark guns, atom bombs -- that have potentially devastating side-effects. Therefore, a minor amount of prudence and forethought seems like a small price to pay for peace of mind.
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Lake Effect, a weblog
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
no hero scientist.
a six-year old girl with an iMac.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
(Don't get it? http://www.garynorth.com
There's a funny commentary at http://www.garysouth.com, and another supposedly at http://garynorth.shadowscape.net, which appears to be down now :(. )
What was theorized that we might see left over from the Big Bang is quantum black holes, of a few million or billion tons (the mass of a big iceberg or small asteroid). So far there is no evidence for their existence.
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
mister attack says:
....
The idea that we are going to destroy the world with the RHIC is absolutely ridiculous. I remember reading that a large number of physicists thought the first nuclear weapon would ignite the atmosphere, destroying all life on Earth. Didn't happen.
This is a logical fallacy known as post hoc ergo propter hoc. Just because we haven't destroyed the earth in the past doesn't mean we can't do it.
Now we have a _journalist_ - not even a Ph.D. in physics - claiming that we're going to create a black hole with the RHIC.
Ad hominem. In fact, objections have been raised within the scientific community. They have been taken seriously enough to be reviewed by the laboratory. They disagreed, of course.
This is a remote possibility, to say the least - collisions at much higher energy than this happen in our upper atmosphere daily without destroying us. But assuming for a moment that a black hole is created, what happens? The answer is simple: it will evaporate.
At last a real argument. I happen to agree with you in principle; I'm not going to lose sleep over these experiments. But I don't think that going around shouting "rubbish!" at people is the way to make your point. There are valid scientific questions to be raised here, and while the field of high-energy physics may be dominated by people who believe it's perfectly safe, the objections do not come from left field. It may not be this experiment, but I would not rule out the possibility that in the near future we could devise experiments that would be capable of creating (say) a microscopic black hole.
I'd be more worried about ballistic nukes from China.
Most people should worry about a) heart disease, b) lung cancer, and c) an auto accident, in roughly that order. Since we all know that very few people give those very real dangers any thought at all
No, I don't believe RHIC is going to kill us all. But can we indeed come up with an experimental device that could? Most certainly. And human history is filled with enough follies by people who "know what they're doing" (say, Challenger) that I don't put all my trust in the intelligentsia here. The only safeguard is an atmosphere of collegiality where objections such as the one raised against RHIC are treated seriously and given due consideration in a peer review process.
That has happened, and has completed. It's only afterwards that the media really got hold of the story, and as they always do, they report it as if it were two equally valid political positions. Don't give in to the hysteria by treating all such objections with contempt.
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Lake Effect, a weblog
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
Recalling that normal matter is made up of atomic particles, which themselves are composed of subparticles (quarks and leptons). Quarks summarized here. "Strange matter" is simply matter that is made up mainly of the quark with the flavor "strange" (the name comes from the strangeness of their long lifetimes compared with other known particles).
It holds a relationship to normal matter something akin to antimatter's, although it is not antimatter (there is "normal" strange matter and "antimatter" strange matter). Basically, it looks like normal matter but isn't made up of the same kinds of subparticles. I think that strange matter in general is nowhere near as stable as normal matter.
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Lake Effect, a weblog
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
Only, I doubt that they'll even get the term "Black Hole" right. My bet is on, "Blank Hole" or perhaps "Black Hood" or somesuch.
Edu. sig-line: Choose rhymes with lose. Chose rhymes with goes. Loose rhymes with goose.
Comparing? THEN use THAN.
Sorry, but you've been had.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
"Warning: Use of this produce can cause space time to eat itself"
In my day, we didn't have particle accelerators. We had to tickle the dragon's tail with lumps of radioactive uranium isotpes. AND WE LIKED IT!
These confounded kids today with their theory of evolution, beowulf clusters, open-source operating systems. MAMBY PAMBY! HUH! In my day, Mr. Watson told us there was a world market for four or five computers and we liked it.
Well, I don't think that the world is gonna end thanks to that darn Scooby Doo and those darn meddlin' kids.
Romanes eunt domus? People called Romanes, they go the 'ouse? It says Romans go home. No it doesn't. What's Latin fo
It's nice to see a sensible article responding to all too common poorly researched media rubbish.
The sad thing is that it seems people would rather buy sensationalist fiction than (IMHO interesting)
facts. Papers only report what their buyers want
to hear.
I think experimental physics is interesting enough without wildly claiming we're going to risk the
universe every few months. (I expect we'll *really* get onto that kind of dangerous stuff in a decade or two)
I'd be interested in knowing if the authors of that piece have any connection to the Long Island facility or stand to gain any direct benefit from supporting the story that there is no realistic risk.
Personally, I agree with them, in my limited knowledge of particle physics, especially about the idea that collisions of this type and energy (and MUCH higher energy) happen frequently in nature, but I would feel much more comfortable if this was from a truly independant source.
The nagging question is: What if it DOES happen rarely in the uncontrolled collisions of cosmic rays in nature. How would we ever know that a world had been destroyed by conversion to strange matter or converted into a black hole? Sure there is a lot of catastrophic, random badness that happens in the universe, but is such an accident any MORE likely to happen in a controlled environment?
There is just something far to elegant about the idea that this type of experiment is just the reason there are no signs of intelligent life in the universe...
The Brookhaven effort has one thing going for it, and that is observability. The collisions will be nice and conveniently placed so we can analyze what's going on in them and get data; to get anything new about quark-gluon plasmas we're going to have to have detectors right on top of the action. If it weren't for that, we'd be far better off just watching what Nature throws at us for free.
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Personally, I almost wish a black hole would sweep down from that big bad particle accelerator and wipe out earth, just so we could stop having to read these ignorant doomsayers (Fred Moody) predict the end of the world....how's that for recursive irony?
"Get out of my way! Can't you see I'm trying to save the world!!" -Xion
Ever since I first heard this story, I've suspected that it was a rumor that came from an urban legend inadvertantly started by Forever Peace.
Good book, too, though not as good as Forever War.
The cake is a pie
The Moon would take a hammering of about 1e19 J/m^2 on the Earth-facing side. The entire near side would also be vaporized, along with every trace of human activity on the Moon. It would also receive a hell of a kick. I don't know if it would hold together or be blown to pieces, but I'm absolutely certain that it would not remain in orbit around the former Earth.
Mars, at some 40 million miles away at closest approach, would get about 1/40000 as much flux as the Moon at the worst. That's still on the order of a megaton per square meter! Just face it, if any planet in the Solar system went down a black hole, the entire neighborhood would be a pretty unhealthy place to be for the duration.
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Wouldn't it make sense that, these black holes out there would eventually all converge together, gaining mass and 'size', presumably even increasing escape velocity?
The right answer is that space is almost empty, so the black hole cannot grow quickly. (but see below for more)
A black hole has the same gravitational pull as a star of the same mass would. So, if our Sun miraculously became a black hole, it could not suck in the Earth. Black holes are special because you can get really close to them. Since gravity decreases as the distance squared, small distance equals strong gravity.
Radiation is not a significant factor. Only very small black holes radiate significantly enough to matter. A solar-mass black hole would take 10^67 years to evaporate... alienmole had it right above.
In a high-density environment, black holes do grow. Namely, in the center of galaxies we see black holes that can be like a million or 10 million times the mass of the Sun. Ones which are actively feeding (on gas clouds, stars, etc) may explain quasars (the brightest sustained light sources in the universe).
The Milky Way almost certainly has a pretty decent sized black hole in the center, so our galaxy may once have hosted a quasar.
M87 has a somewhat active one now. See http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/a pod/index/blackhole.html for more observational evidence of black holes.
RHIC will operate at energies of up to about 100 GeV per nucleon (that is, proton or neutron).
There is lots of scientific information about RHIC here. Follow the links to "Documentation" and "RHIC Design Manual" for detailed information about its motivation and specifications.
But you can be certain of one thing -- there will be a TV movie made within six months about a black hole created by clueless scientists that threatens to destroys the earth. Destroy, that is, until the hero scientist that no-one listened to comes up with a magic black hole plug...
Jack
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
The idea that we are going to destroy the world with the RHIC is absolutely ridiculous. I remember reading that a large number of physicists thought the first nuclear weapon would ignite the atmosphere, destroying all life on Earth. Didn't happen. Now we have a _journalist_ - not even a Ph.D. in physics - claiming that we're going to create a black hole with the RHIC. This is a remote possibility, to say the least - collisions at much higher energy than this happen in our upper atmosphere daily without destroying us. But assuming for a moment that a black hole is created, what happens? The answer is simple: it will evaporate. Black holes lose mass constantly (a consequence of quantum mechanics). A black hole of the size that would be created by two gold ions colliding would be gone in a matter of microseconds, if I remember my astro course correctly. What's more, the Swarzschild radius would be so tiny, and the densities in the ion beam so low, that there is only a probability on the order of 1E-35 that another ion would fall past the event horizon before said event horizon disappears. In short, we have nothing to worry about. At least not from RHIC. I'd be more worried about ballistic nukes from China.
A -much- more devastating weapon would be created if there was an effective way to tunnel, in a controlled manner. Link two quantum-scale wormholes together, get one into the target area and inflate the tunnel. Whatever you lobbed through the tunnel would arrive at the other mouth of the wormhole, without apparently traversing any intermediate space. It would be impossible to shield against, and impossible to detect.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Ever notice that our science consists mostly of bashing things together or sticking things in other things. We've been doing this for tens of thousands of years now. Maybe it's time to start hunting for a new paradigm.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?