KentuckyFC writes "There is absolutely, positively, definitely no chance of the LHC destroying the planet (or this way either) when it eventually switches on some time later this year. And yet a few niggling doubts are persuading some scientists to run through their figures again. One potential method of destruction is that the LHC will create tiny black holes that could swallow everything in their path, including the planet. Various scientists have said this will not happen because the black holes would decay before they could do any damage. But physicists who have re-run the calculations now say that the mini black holes produced by the LHC could last for seconds, possibly minutes. Of course, the real question is whether they decay faster than they can grow. The new calculations suggest that the decay mechanism should win over and that the catastrophic growth of a black hole from the LHC 'does not seem possible' (abstract). But shouldn't we require better assurance than that?"
I wonder if they are taking any bets on the probability of an "oops" incident.
Source: July 16, 1945: Trinity Blast Opens Atomic Age @ Wired [wired.com]
"The Trinity test, as it was known, was the culmination of the American effort to win the race against Germany (and, ultimately, the Soviet Union) in building an atomic bomb. A mere three weeks after the test, the United States used atomic bombs to destroy the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But prior to the 16th, none of those involved in the project knew if they had built a devastating new weapon or a spectacular dud.
With gallows humor, the Los Alamos physicists got up a betting pool on the possible yield of the bomb. Estimates ranged from zero to as high as 45,000 tons of TNT. Enrico Fermi, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1938 for his work on nuclear fission, offered side odds on the bomb destroying all life on the planet."
I think that pretty much sums up the way that the scientists on these kind of projects really think about these things, and I find it reassuring. They are just as unenthusiastic about the prospect disappearing into nothingness as you are. They are smarter than me. They are also almost certainly smarter than you. If they are comfortable enough to joke/make bets then I'm not worried.
Enrico Fermi, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1938 for his work on nuclear fission, offered side odds on the bomb destroying all life on the planet.
Assuming he's betting on the "No" side, he probably should have got a prize for economics too. If you're right -- you win money. If you lose -- everyone's dead anyway so you don't have to pay! Its a win-win proposition.
And not just that: having the entire earth annihilated by incredible gravitational forces unleashed by man's own Faustian arrogance would be the most utterly Fucking Metal thing ever. Orders of magnitude more metal than thermonuclear weapons, the current favorite, or satan, the historical contender.
My urologist was actually quite funny. When he was done he said, "Well, I've finished with the second one... but I found a third." I was a bit confused and shocked and then he laughed and said he was just kidding.
Yes. At some point in the future, I'm fine with the universe unfolding like so:
Mother: Tottle, do NOT do that! Child: But mom, they are just small ones. Mother: You remember what happened to the humans, don't you? Child: They danced funny? Mother: Besides that...... (hand on hip) Child: (face frowning slowly) Yes mother, they blew up the southeast quarter of the galaxy experimenting with black holes. Mother: that's right Tottle. It's all fun and games till chunks of the galaxy go missing. Your father will NOT be impressed if he can't find our house after he gets off work tonight. Child: yes mother Mother: now put your physics set away and make your bed. Child: yes mother
Yes, I'd be happy to be a footnote in the history of the universe as an example of what you really shouldn't do with your Acme Physics set that you got for your birthday.
There is absolutely, positively, definitely no chance of the LHC destroying the planet (or this way either) when it eventually switches on some time later this year....
But physicists who have re-run the calculations now say that the mini black holes produced by the LHC could last for seconds, possibly minutes. Of course, the real question is whether they decay faster than they can grow.
Well its good to know that despite their uncertainty about the the data, they are absolutely certain of their conclusions.
Even if the black holes lasted indefinately, their cross sectional area is too small to pick up any significant amount of matter. The Earth would be swallowed up by the sun long before the black hole began to threaten Earth in any way.
by Anonymous Coward
on Friday January 23 2009, @12:41PM (#26577145)
No. The fact is that the mass of the particles is going to be negligible compared to your arm, and the size is going to be negligible compared to atoms. The Shwarzchild radius for a 1kg black hole is ~1.5 x 10^-27 m, or 12 orders of magnitude smaller than radius of the nucleus of an atom.
These black holes aren't going to have appreciable gravitational pull, and they aren't going to have appreciable cross section to actually absorb matter.
The truth is, we already know darn well what is going to happen macroscopically. We know physics pretty darn well. Its the very fine details that we aren't sure about.
I thought that this entire line of doomerism had been dispensed with thanks to cosmic rays.
Since cosmic rays are striking the earth all the time, and a decent percentage of them have a much higher energy level than anything the LHC can produce, we should have already seen such a phenomena.
Small black holes are far less dangerous than made out to be. I wouldn't like to be very near one due to its Hawking radiation (virtual photon creation near the event horizon where one of the virtual photons is absorbed and the other turns real as it escapes), but the fear mongers of black holes forget the limiting factor. Matter falling into a black hole is compressed and gets hot. The hot matter radiates light / gamma rays. While in some cases this radiation might be captured as well, it is far more likely that the radiation pressure will limit the rate of matter absorption by the black hole. The radiation pressure effect is known as the Eddinton effect and is a major factor in stellar stability. In the case of a small black hole, the size of the black hole is far smaller than the absorption length of gamma rays, preventing advection of the gammas. Since a non-rotating black hole is likely to convert on the order of 1% of the absorbed mass into gamma radiation, such a source would be more than capable of creating a near vacuum of hot matter about itself.
If such stable black holes were creatable / existed, we should see rather remarkable things with old white dwarfs and neutron stars, which would be greatly affected by such energy sources.
What I find more interesting is that if these miniature black holes can give off a minute of Hawking radiation then it means the final seconds of a black hole look less like a bomb and more like a really bright flashbulb. This is great news for some science fiction authors as it means potential Hawking radiation reactors are actually NOT suicidal for a species to build.
That's what I thought, too, and in the comment section you'll find a comment from Geoffrey A. Landis [geoffreylandis.com], scientist at the NASA John Glenn Research Center, stating:
Jeez - read the abstract. Its a calculation based on a theoretical model using some very speculative physics for which there is NO EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER. Really. Ignore it.
The main thing to keep in mind is, cosmic rays have energies vastly higher than the LHC. If the LHC could produce black holes, then there would be black holes floating around everywhere.
There is no need for comments on this article other than the parent. In fact, this article should just be put into idle.
As a physicist, this whole thing has been an embarrassing reminder of just how bad physicists are at public relations and the failure of many people to think logically. I'm not the biggest fan of LHC, but I'd like to see some intelligent criticism out there (Is this really where we should be putting our smartest scientists? Are particle accelerators the best way to do this measurement?), not this junk.
> Is this really where we should be putting our smartest scientists?
What gives us the right to decide where to 'put' 'our' smartest scientists? They belong to themselves, right? It is their choice what to do with their brains (cure cancer or get drunk or work at the LHC).
If you insist on asking a question I guess you could ask 'Do we really want to fund the LHC?'.
Actually cosmic rays don't fully replicate the black hole problem. Keep in mind that a black hole in the LHC would be fed for some bit of time by the stream of high energy particles in the LHC before it leaves the beam path and that black holes apparently have a relatively large cross section compared to subatomic particles. In theory, if you can feed a black hole more mass than it loses, you'll eventually grow it large enough to cause a problem, if you drop it into the Earth.
Having said that, neutron stars are a better case study. They have densities far above that of Earth. For example, the average density of Earth is somewhere around 5.5*10^3 kg/m^3, presumably a little more in the core and around 2.5-3 kg/m^3 near the surface (I guess). The surface of a neutron star [wikipedia.org] can have densities around 10^9 kg/m^3. That's almost a million times as dense. The interior can be far higher, somewhere above 10^17 kg/m^3. That's a factor of 10^14 more. Glancing at wikipedia [wikipedia.org], the power output of a black hole is proportional to the inverse square of the mass. The cross-section area is proportional to the 2/3 power of the mass (mass is proportional to volume which is proportional to 3/2 the power of the cross-sectional area). That leads to the tricky observation that the ratio of mass sucked to mass lost is proportional to 8/3 power power of mass. So a black hole formed by such a cosmic ray immediately interacts with mass roughly 10^6 denser than the surface of the Earth. Neutron stars obviously have a massively greater acceleration (10^12 stronger roughly), so velocities will be a lot faster. Let's suppose that means that a black hole on a neutron star intercepts 10^18 (=10^12 * 10^6) times as much mass as it would on Earth. For a black hole on a neutron star to have the same ratio of mass in to out as one in Earth would have, it'd need a mass almost 10^7 times smaller.
Some natural cosmic rays are known to have energies above 10^20 eV. In comparison, the energy of lead ions (the highest energy particles mentioned in the wikipedia article) in the LHC will be somewhere around 10^15 eV. At a stab, that means black holes in neutron stars ought to form with initial masses of around 10^20 eV and dissipate, else the neutron star would rapidly go away. So to generate black holes with equivalent mass in/out ratios to those on a neutron star generated by the most powerful cosmic rays we've observed, we'd need around 10^12 lead ion particles crammed into the black hole to duplicate a black hole we know dissipates on the surface of a neutron star. While there's probably that many in the beam, it doesn't strike me that the black hole will intercept many of them before it is knocked out of the beam path. The black hole might even escape Earth's gravity altogether since it is likely to start with a velocity that is a significant fraction of the speed of light. I ignore the initial velocity in the above calculation because the speed has to slow to below escape velocity before there is a problem of black hole growth.
> What happens if one of these black holes happens to intercept a spacecraft as it leaves > or re-enters the atmosphere? Does it do significant damage?
No. Try to understand how small these holes would be. They are so tiny that in the unlikely event that they hit the nucleus of an atom they would almost certainly pass through with out interacting at all with any of the subatomic particles there. Your spacecraft is going to be hit by cosmic rays with far more energy and with a far higher probability of interacting.
Teller did. According to this article [wikipedia.org], he showed that igniting the atmosphere was possible, but unlikely. He just didn't cover up the data fast enough, and it got out.
Teller also raised the speculative possibility that an atomic bomb might "ignite" the atmosphere, because of a hypothetical fusion reaction of nitrogen nuclei.[citation needed] Bethe calculated, according to Serber, that it could not happen. However, a report co-authored by Teller showed that ignition of the atmosphere was not impossible, just unlikely.[6] In Serber's account, Oppenheimer mentioned it to Arthur Compton, who "didn't have enough sense to shut up about it. It somehow got into a document that went to Washington" which led to the question being "never laid to rest".[7]
But shouldn't we require better assurance than that?
What better assurance can we get than mathematical formulas? Unfortunately the only other way to find out is to run an experiment, right? I just hope their formulas and the assumptions they are based on are correct.
The Sun in conjunction with the Earth's atmosphere has been colliding particles with WAY higher energies that the LHC could ever manage for billions of years now. As far as I know we've not been consumed by a mini black hole yet.
Heh - when you're talking about a black hole at or smaller than the size of an atomic nucleus it doesn't matter whether it's at the top of the atmosphere or at the center of the Earth. Matter at that scale is described as tenuous at best. You'd have to get somewhere like the center of the sun or denser before a collision would be anywhere near likely.
by Anonymous Coward
on Friday January 23 2009, @11:10AM (#26575395)
This could be why we do not see Advanced Alien Civilizations - their technological sophistication gets to a point where they eventually play with some sort of basic question of physics and have a planet ending disaster. Yet another reason to colonize Mars, and do this type of research there.
Actually, a black hole at mars orbit wouldn't do any damage (to us) because if it swallowed up Mars, it would have the same mass as mars, thus leaving everything else untouched. A black hole on earth would well, not be enjoyable for us.
There will be no black holes, well except for very tiny ones that will wink out of existence in mere nanoseconds. Certainly no more than a couple of microseconds. At most a second. Likely tops of a minute. Absolutely can't be more than seven minutes...
A black hole is just the gravity well of a given mass compressed into a sufficiently small space. In this case, the given mass is miniscule, so very little (practically nothing, hence the "evaporation" issue) will be drawn to it.
You have more to worry about from the gravitational pull of your shoes.
If you bothered to go past the Slashdot summary of the arXiv blog summary of the paper's abstract summary, and actually RTFA by Casadio et al. [arxiv.org], you would find the following:
We can conclude that black holes created at the LHC under the warped brane-world scenario and described according to Ref. [4] would always remain microscopically small in mass and radius when traversing through the Earth.
and also this:
We conclude that, for the RS scenario and black holes described by the metric (6), the growth of black holes to catastrophic size does not seem possible. Nonetheless, it remains true that the expected decay times are much longer (and possibly â 1 sec) than is typically predicted by other models, as was first shown in Ref.[4].
Possibly, potentially, maybe, under certain conditions, they might be longer lived than expected. They still can't grow.
If the LHC manages to create mini blck holes, let's be clear here, tese will be very very mini. A black hole weighing what? Same as a couple atoms of carbon?
Consider that even if matter collapses to a singularity, its gravitational effect is still just proportional to its mass. Given that the LHC is a vacuum where the collisions are occuring, the blackhole could only ever mass the sum total of the mass of the particles used in the collision. From a casual outside observer you wouldn't even notice, and the black hole would decay before it could acquire more mass.
The most energetic particle that the LHC can create is 574 TeV/particle lead nuclei. Nature has been bombarding our solar system with a significant flux of particles as powerful as 100 million TeV for as long as it's been around. If it was possible to spawn a black hole capable of consuming a planet from a collision with a particle a mere thousand TeV in energy, then it is all but certain that we would have seen every large body in our solar system converted from billions of years of bombardment from cosmics ray 100,000 times more energetic (caveat: much more energy is available for consumption into a black hole should two particles collide "head-on" with opposing momenta versus a fast particle with a stationary target).
Though, the above reasoning does not exclude the possibility that black holes that may last minutes but yet not consume planets.
I find it hilarious how people say, "Before we run an experiment, we need to know what will happen!" Hello, McFly! You run experiments to FIND OUT WHAT WILL HAPPEN. That's, uhm, the whole FRAKING DEFINITION OF THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD! You can do the math, you can form theories, you can hypothesize... but you never know FOR SURE until you flip the switch.
People like the OP were probably standing around in caveman days, saying, "Ugh. No make fire. What if fire is monster, kill everyone? Bad thing. Not make fire unless know not monster."
Groups of high energy particles striking each other is not rare in nature. It happens all the time, right in our own atmosphere, on the surface of the moon.
People have this amazing misunderstanding of black holes generated by Hollywood. If you take the moon, and crush it into a black hole, it will still follow the same orbital path, and have the same effect on the tides as it does currently. It will just occupy a much smaller space. Its event horizon with be incredibly small, and the amount of mass that would be added to annually would be about the same as it gains now through occasional collisions of small objects in space (i.e.,just about 0)
Since they will not have immense mass to apply to the particles, they will have to apply truly immense amounts of energy (E=mc^2). Should they actually achieve a 'black hole', it will have the same amount of gravitational attraction as it did before.
I think I will spend my time worrying about more likely problems, like cholesterol and cancer.
Actually, cosmic rays, which regularly (read: constantly) enter our atmosphere, have energies up to 10^20 eV. The LHC uses 7 TeV protons and ~500 TeV lead nuclei. That's on the order of 10^12 to 10^14 eV.
So, you have it backwards. We don't produce particle at anywhere near the energy they're produced in nature.
It's Crazy (Score:5, Funny)
Folks I don't want to hear say oops (Score:5, Funny)
1. My Barber
2. My urologist during my vasectomy.
3. The LHC scientists during the first collisions.
Re:Folks I don't want to hear say oops (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Folks I don't want to hear say oops (Score:5, Interesting)
I think that pretty much sums up the way that the scientists on these kind of projects really think about these things, and I find it reassuring. They are just as unenthusiastic about the prospect disappearing into nothingness as you are. They are smarter than me. They are also almost certainly smarter than you. If they are comfortable enough to joke/make bets then I'm not worried.
Parent
Re:Folks I don't want to hear say oops (Score:5, Funny)
Enrico Fermi, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1938 for his work on nuclear fission, offered side odds on the bomb destroying all life on the planet.
Assuming he's betting on the "No" side, he probably should have got a prize for economics too. If you're right -- you win money. If you lose -- everyone's dead anyway so you don't have to pay! Its a win-win proposition.
(Ok maybe win-win isn't the right term here)
Parent
I say "go for it!" (Score:5, Funny)
If they're right the benefit to humanity could be enormous.
If they're wrong then it's the end of the economic crisis, unemployment, conflict in the Middle East and world hunger.
So, on balance ... I think they should do it.
Parent
Re:I say "go for it!" (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Folks I don't want to hear say oops (Score:5, Funny)
I said it before: Lake Hadron. New shoreline real estate for sale, soon.
Don't mind the Schwarzchild radius, come on in!
Parent
Re:Folks I don't want to hear say oops (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Folks I don't want to hear say oops (Score:4, Funny)
How can an LHC scientist say oops if their vocal cords have entered another dimension of space and time?
At the LHC's first collisions, a black hole forms....
scientist: Oops... OMFG! Call the President!
evil voice from inside the black hole: What good is a phone call if you are unable to speak?
Parent
Re:Folks I don't want to hear say oops (Score:5, Funny)
Yes. At some point in the future, I'm fine with the universe unfolding like so:
Mother: Tottle, do NOT do that!
Child: But mom, they are just small ones.
Mother: You remember what happened to the humans, don't you?
Child: They danced funny?
Mother: Besides that...... (hand on hip)
Child: (face frowning slowly) Yes mother, they blew up the southeast quarter of the galaxy experimenting with black holes.
Mother: that's right Tottle. It's all fun and games till chunks of the galaxy go missing. Your father will NOT be impressed if he can't find our house after he gets off work tonight.
Child: yes mother
Mother: now put your physics set away and make your bed.
Child: yes mother
Yes, I'd be happy to be a footnote in the history of the universe as an example of what you really shouldn't do with your Acme Physics set that you got for your birthday.
Parent
Re:Folks I don't want to hear say oops (Score:5, Funny)
Four minutes?! I'll be damned if they make black holes that last longer than I do!
Parent
Re:Folks I don't want to hear say oops (Score:5, Funny)
I'm hoping it'll suck more than my wife.
Yeah... me too.
Parent
Its all okay. Nothing to see here. (Score:5, Insightful)
Well its good to know that despite their uncertainty about the the data, they are absolutely certain of their conclusions.
Re:Its all okay. Nothing to see here. (Score:4, Informative)
Even if the black holes lasted indefinately, their cross sectional area is too small to pick up any significant amount of matter. The Earth would be swallowed up by the sun long before the black hole began to threaten Earth in any way.
Parent
Re:Its all okay. Nothing to see here. (Score:5, Informative)
These black holes aren't going to have appreciable gravitational pull, and they aren't going to have appreciable cross section to actually absorb matter.
The truth is, we already know darn well what is going to happen macroscopically. We know physics pretty darn well. Its the very fine details that we aren't sure about.
Parent
Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Fire it up, boys!
Re:Not so fast there old chap! (Score:5, Funny)
In theory.
Parent
cosmic rays (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought that this entire line of doomerism had been dispensed with thanks to cosmic rays.
Since cosmic rays are striking the earth all the time, and a decent percentage of them have a much higher energy level than anything the LHC can produce, we should have already seen such a phenomena.
?
Re:cosmic rays (Score:5, Interesting)
If such stable black holes were creatable / existed, we should see rather remarkable things with old white dwarfs and neutron stars, which would be greatly affected by such energy sources.
Parent
Re:cosmic rays (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Couldn't agree more... (Score:5, Funny)
Small black holes are far less dangerous than made out to be.
A while back we had a family of small black holes living in our basement, and I found that if you didn't bother them, they wouldn't bother you.
The wife wanted rid of them, but I said no, they're not doing any harm to anyone - and anyway we never used that part of the basement.
Eventually they just moved on.
Parent
Re:cosmic rays (Score:5, Informative)
Jeez - read the abstract. Its a calculation based on a theoretical model using some very speculative physics for which there is NO EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER. Really. Ignore it.
The main thing to keep in mind is, cosmic rays have energies vastly higher than the LHC. If the LHC could produce black holes, then there would be black holes floating around everywhere.
Parent
Re:cosmic rays (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no need for comments on this article other than the parent. In fact, this article should just be put into idle.
As a physicist, this whole thing has been an embarrassing reminder of just how bad physicists are at public relations and the failure of many people to think logically. I'm not the biggest fan of LHC, but I'd like to see some intelligent criticism out there (Is this really where we should be putting our smartest scientists? Are particle accelerators the best way to do this measurement?), not this junk.
Parent
Re:cosmic rays (Score:5, Insightful)
> Is this really where we should be putting our smartest scientists?
What gives us the right to decide where to 'put' 'our' smartest scientists? They belong to themselves, right? It is their choice what to do with their brains (cure cancer or get drunk or work at the LHC).
If you insist on asking a question I guess you could ask 'Do we really want to fund the LHC?'.
Parent
Re:cosmic rays (Score:4, Informative)
Actually cosmic rays don't fully replicate the black hole problem. Keep in mind that a black hole in the LHC would be fed for some bit of time by the stream of high energy particles in the LHC before it leaves the beam path and that black holes apparently have a relatively large cross section compared to subatomic particles. In theory, if you can feed a black hole more mass than it loses, you'll eventually grow it large enough to cause a problem, if you drop it into the Earth.
Having said that, neutron stars are a better case study. They have densities far above that of Earth. For example, the average density of Earth is somewhere around 5.5*10^3 kg/m^3, presumably a little more in the core and around 2.5-3 kg/m^3 near the surface (I guess). The surface of a neutron star [wikipedia.org] can have densities around 10^9 kg/m^3. That's almost a million times as dense. The interior can be far higher, somewhere above 10^17 kg/m^3. That's a factor of 10^14 more. Glancing at wikipedia [wikipedia.org], the power output of a black hole is proportional to the inverse square of the mass. The cross-section area is proportional to the 2/3 power of the mass (mass is proportional to volume which is proportional to 3/2 the power of the cross-sectional area). That leads to the tricky observation that the ratio of mass sucked to mass lost is proportional to 8/3 power power of mass. So a black hole formed by such a cosmic ray immediately interacts with mass roughly 10^6 denser than the surface of the Earth. Neutron stars obviously have a massively greater acceleration (10^12 stronger roughly), so velocities will be a lot faster. Let's suppose that means that a black hole on a neutron star intercepts 10^18 (=10^12 * 10^6) times as much mass as it would on Earth. For a black hole on a neutron star to have the same ratio of mass in to out as one in Earth would have, it'd need a mass almost 10^7 times smaller.
Some natural cosmic rays are known to have energies above 10^20 eV. In comparison, the energy of lead ions (the highest energy particles mentioned in the wikipedia article) in the LHC will be somewhere around 10^15 eV. At a stab, that means black holes in neutron stars ought to form with initial masses of around 10^20 eV and dissipate, else the neutron star would rapidly go away. So to generate black holes with equivalent mass in/out ratios to those on a neutron star generated by the most powerful cosmic rays we've observed, we'd need around 10^12 lead ion particles crammed into the black hole to duplicate a black hole we know dissipates on the surface of a neutron star. While there's probably that many in the beam, it doesn't strike me that the black hole will intercept many of them before it is knocked out of the beam path. The black hole might even escape Earth's gravity altogether since it is likely to start with a velocity that is a significant fraction of the speed of light. I ignore the initial velocity in the above calculation because the speed has to slow to below escape velocity before there is a problem of black hole growth.
Parent
Re:cosmic rays (Score:5, Interesting)
> What happens if one of these black holes happens to intercept a spacecraft as it leaves
> or re-enters the atmosphere? Does it do significant damage?
No. Try to understand how small these holes would be. They are so tiny that in the unlikely event that they hit the nucleus of an atom they would almost certainly pass through with out interacting at all with any of the subatomic particles there. Your spacecraft is going to be hit by cosmic rays with far more energy and with a far higher probability of interacting.
Parent
What could possibly go wrong? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What could possibly go wrong? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:What could possibly go wrong? (Score:4, Informative)
Not as much fallout as what is created by burning coal to create electricity.
Parent
Assurances (Score:5, Informative)
But shouldn't we require better assurance than that?
What better assurance can we get than mathematical formulas? Unfortunately the only other way to find out is to run an experiment, right? I just hope their formulas and the assumptions they are based on are correct.
Space Madness (Score:5, Funny)
And there's no possible way that Stimpy would be stupid enough to press the beautiful, shiny button - the jolly, candy-like button.
and nothing of value was lost?
Storm in a very, very tiny teacup (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, duh! (Score:5, Funny)
those mini black holes were up in the air, not next to the earth you ninny.
sheesh, next thing someone will make a video game with this scenario
Parent
Re:Well, duh! (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Advanced Alien Civilizations (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Advanced Alien Civilizations (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Bruce Campbell at the LHC (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, I would really feel a lot better if the LHC deployed Bruce Campbell, with a shotgun during those Black Hole experiments:
Evil Witch/Black Hole: "I'll swallow your soul! I'll swallow your soul!"
Bruce points his shotgun at the Evil Witch/Black Hole:
Bruce: "Swallow this."
*Blam*
seconds and minutes (Score:5, Funny)
when they say seconds and minutes is that in normal earth time or according to the time inside the micro event horizon?
Absolutely, positively, (Score:5, Funny)
The Quantum Make a Wish Foundation (Score:5, Funny)
Everyone wins a free trip to France.
Gravity still applies (Score:5, Insightful)
A black hole is just the gravity well of a given mass compressed into a sufficiently small space. In this case, the given mass is miniscule, so very little (practically nothing, hence the "evaporation" issue) will be drawn to it.
You have more to worry about from the gravitational pull of your shoes.
Screw mini-black holes. (Score:5, Funny)
It's the ice-9 strangelets that have me worried.
Cite the original paper (Score:4, Informative)
If you bothered to go past the Slashdot summary of the arXiv blog summary of the paper's abstract summary, and actually RTFA by Casadio et al. [arxiv.org], you would find the following:
and also this:
Possibly, potentially, maybe, under certain conditions, they might be longer lived than expected. They still can't grow.
Go back to worrying about your 401Ks.
Even if it does so what? (Score:5, Informative)
If the LHC manages to create mini blck holes, let's be clear here, tese will be very very mini. A black hole weighing what? Same as a couple atoms of carbon?
Consider that even if matter collapses to a singularity, its gravitational effect is still just proportional to its mass. Given that the LHC is a vacuum where the collisions are occuring, the blackhole could only ever mass the sum total of the mass of the particles used in the collision. From a casual outside observer you wouldn't even notice, and the black hole would decay before it could acquire more mass.
Cosmic Rays anyone? (Score:4, Informative)
The most energetic particle that the LHC can create is 574 TeV/particle lead nuclei. Nature has been bombarding our solar system with a significant flux of particles as powerful as 100 million TeV for as long as it's been around. If it was possible to spawn a black hole capable of consuming a planet from a collision with a particle a mere thousand TeV in energy, then it is all but certain that we would have seen every large body in our solar system converted from billions of years of bombardment from cosmics ray 100,000 times more energetic (caveat: much more energy is available for consumption into a black hole should two particles collide "head-on" with opposing momenta versus a fast particle with a stationary target).
Though, the above reasoning does not exclude the possibility that black holes that may last minutes but yet not consume planets.
~Ben
"Answer first, experiment second" -- the FRAK? (Score:5, Funny)
I find it hilarious how people say, "Before we run an experiment, we need to know what will happen!" Hello, McFly! You run experiments to FIND OUT WHAT WILL HAPPEN. That's, uhm, the whole FRAKING DEFINITION OF THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD! You can do the math, you can form theories, you can hypothesize... but you never know FOR SURE until you flip the switch.
People like the OP were probably standing around in caveman days, saying, "Ugh. No make fire. What if fire is monster, kill everyone? Bad thing. Not make fire unless know not monster."
Bogus (Score:5, Informative)
Groups of high energy particles striking each other is not rare in nature. It happens all the time, right in our own atmosphere, on the surface of the moon.
This is all Chicken-Little nonsense.
Parent
Agreed, this is silly. (Score:5, Informative)
Since they will not have immense mass to apply to the particles, they will have to apply truly immense amounts of energy (E=mc^2). Should they actually achieve a 'black hole', it will have the same amount of gravitational attraction as it did before.
I think I will spend my time worrying about more likely problems, like cholesterol and cancer.
Parent
Re:Bogus (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, cosmic rays, which regularly (read: constantly) enter our atmosphere, have energies up to 10^20 eV. The LHC uses 7 TeV protons and ~500 TeV lead nuclei. That's on the order of 10^12 to 10^14 eV.
So, you have it backwards. We don't produce particle at anywhere near the energy they're produced in nature.
Parent