Black Holes From the LHC Could Last For Minutes 672
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?"
It's Crazy (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The vacuum between that girl's ears must be vastly superior to the LHC's.
She must be studied.
Repeatedly.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
And you're willing to probe that general area?
*Extemely* unlikely (Score:4, Funny)
It's like the odds of a black man becoming President of the United States.
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: (Score:2, Funny)
How can an LHC scientist say oops if their vocal cords have entered another dimension of space and time?
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?
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.
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!
Re:Folks I don't want to hear say oops (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Re:Folks I don't want to hear say oops (Score:5, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
was there not some calculations done at the time that suggested that the atmosphere itself could be ignited?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Uh, not much of the Manhattan project was "all over the popular press" at the time.
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)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If there is no time limit to these side odds of Enrico Fermi's--then odds could very well happen if we saw a WW3.
I suppose it'd be pretty hard for man to technically wipe out all life with current technology. However, all of man and most large critters is close enough in my book. Hell, even knocking man back to the stone age is enough in my book.
I wonder--did anyone bet on that one and side with annihilation? what were the odds he gave? :)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, it wouldn't be *THAT* difficult to wipe out all life on Earth, if that was your intention, and you controlled a major country (or equivalent) and you could afford to be patient. Asteroid orbits aren't *THAT* difficult to perturb. You might have to make a few orbital corrections, but I think that a solar powered mass driver on a large asteroid could probably perturb the orbit in a way that would wipe out all life on Earth within a century...though possibly some of the bacteria that live deep unde
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.
Re:I say "go for it!" (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I say "go for it!" (Score:4, Funny)
OK, no more metalocalypse for you!
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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!
Re:Folks I don't want to hear say oops (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I was so not in a joking mood at the end of that experience-
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I doubt you're awake during brain surgery, but I'd rather hear a urologist say "oops" than a brain surgeon. After all, they can sew your penis back on, but there's no fixing a torn or cut brain.
Actually it's pretty standard to be conscious during brain surgery. The reason being that once they start poking around in your brain they don't really have much feedback on what's going on unless you're able to tell them what your experiencing, so if you suddenly say something like "I taste blue" they may know they're in the right ballpark area or not.
look at the bright side (Score:2)
And I'm not just talking about the glowing accretion disk around the hole. If we do generate black holes that swallow the Earth, at least worrying about that will take our minds off the economy!
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.
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.
Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Fire it up, boys!
Re:Not so fast there old chap! (Score:5, Funny)
In theory.
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.
Re:cosmic rays (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Thank goodness we built the LHC to provide science fiction authors another MacGuffin.
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.
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.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Well, ok, since you said so, I just did.
Aw, crap.
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.
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?'.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I wish the government shared your point of view! As a scientist, I'm not entitled to a lab, or funding, or students. I have to ask the government for the ability to do research and their permission to do the research I'd like to do (they regularly check on what I'm doing). If there's no government agency (or private company) that wants to fund me to do what I'd like, I have to do what they want me to do to pay the bills. Occasionally, you can slip some research in that's not supported, but you're not go
Your peers are worse... (Score:3, Interesting)
As a physicist, this whole thing has been an embarrassing reminder of just how bad physicists are at public relations...
Take heart, your peers in climatology and meteorology haven't been able to convince the US that global warming is real, in spite of the fact that several key politicians picked up the cause.
If being unable to convince people that a black hole *won't* happen is the worst you've done, count your blessings.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What I object to is exactly that kind of reasoning.
I'm not a particle physicist, so I don't know the math and formulas and such, but what I do know for sure is that they are incomplete. Our physics doesn't completely account for everything in the universe so there is no way you can say that just because high energy particles have been hitting the planet for eons that LHC can't destroy the planet. For instance, when was the last time a high energy particle hit the earth near a torus of high energy particle
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.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I was talking about RHIC fireballs [bbc.co.uk].
When the gold nuclei smash into each other they are broken down into particles called quarks and gluons.
These form a ball of plasma about 300 times hotter than the surface of the Sun. This fireball, which lasts just 10 million, billion, billionths of a second, can be detected because it absorbs jets of particles produced by the beam collisions.
But Nastase, of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, says there is something unusual about it.
Ten times as many jets were being absorbed by the fireball as were predicted by calculations.
I was interpreting that to mean a black hole has a larger collective cross-sectional area than if the mass that made it up weren't a black hole. I guess it doesn't mean what I thought it did.
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.
What could possibly go wrong? (Score:5, Funny)
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We didn't think any such thing.
Re:What could possibly go wrong? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You shouldn't be so quick to take everything you read on Wikipedia at face value, you know.
What happened was, the possibility was considered, and quickly calculated to be impossible, but somebody still entered it into the betting pool as a very dark joke, same as the "destruction of New Mexico" entry. Both were known to be impossible.
Re:What could possibly go wrong? (Score:4, Informative)
Not as much fallout as what is created by burning coal to create electricity.
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
Re:Well, duh! (Score:5, Interesting)
Advanced Alien Civilizations (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Advanced Alien Civilizations (Score:5, Interesting)
already happens (Score:2, Insightful)
Anything that could happen due to the LHC, already happens daily. The collisions in the LHC aren't as energetic as collisions that occur in the upper atmosphere from cosmic rays, etc ALL OF THE TIME. The reason to build the LHC and other accelerators is that it's kind of a pain in the ass to mount detectors on balloons and *hope* that your detector intercepts some of said cosmic rays...
Assurances (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Better than "does not seem possible"? (Score:2)
Like, "It seriously is un-possible dude!"
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?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I would think you'd need a quantum theory of gravity to express the effects time dilation in or near a black hole of this scale.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You're not. That poor SOB is going to get banned.
Finally! (Score:3, Funny)
Finally, we may have resolved the Fermi Paradox [wikipedia.org].
Absolutely, positively, (Score:5, Funny)
The Quantum Make a Wish Foundation (Score:5, Funny)
Everyone wins a free trip to France.
Can't Grow Fast Enough To Matter (Score:3, Informative)
> Various scientists have said this will not happen because the black holes would decay
> before they could do any damage.
The argument is stronger than that. Even if the holes don't decay at all their collision cross-sections are so small that they cannot get big enough to matter before the sun turns into a red giant and swallows the Earth.
An even stronger argument is that if the LHC can create such holes so can cosmic rays and yet we are still here.
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
No, actually, the black hole is so very minuscule (10^-27 meters) that it could fall straight through a nucleus without absorbing anything.
For comparison, a proton is ~10^-16 meters. Or was that a quark? I'm not off by more than two or three orders of magnitude, anyway, which scarcely matters for this.
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
I'm just glad... (Score:3, Funny)
Actually this is great! Being across the pond, I should have the benefit of at least a femtosecond to be the first to write and publish a paper on the effects of gravity waves before I go. After all, those Europeans are going to be pretty much getting all the glory and making it much harder for us on this side to be recognized for any new discoveries. With this type of discovery, and it being so close to home, they likely won't even see it coming. And for a Scientist there is surely nothing like getting really embedded into your work to make you forget to publish. But face it, sometimes its just better to distance yourself for a more objective look at a situation.
Same process happens in upper atmosphere (Score:3, Informative)
"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."
Figure it out... (Score:3, Informative)
As others have said many times, nature dramatically exceeds any test we've ever done on an almost daily basis. If microscopic black holes were going to gobble up the earth, it would have happened long ago, in fact, all the stars and planets in the universe would now be black holes. You may have noticed, this hasn't happened. ergo...
Think about it... the sun, 186,000 miles across reduces to a black hole, and the radius of the event horizon would be measured in mere dozens of miles. Now squish an atomic nucleus (even carrying the mass of all that acceleration), the resulting black hole and it's event horizon would vanish down to dimensions comparable to the Plank Length. At that dimension, the distance between any particles is beyond imagining. With a lifespan of even hours the best such an object could hope to do is gravitationally disrupt a few atomic nuclii.
This simply isn't a threat to anyone or anything.
Answer: no (Score:3, Insightful)
The doomsayers have grabbed onto this idea of horrible black holes, but the proof that these will even appear are from the same scientists that try to convince them that any black holes, in the unlikely case they will appear, will be harmless. "Assurance" seems to be a requirement directed at only one side of the fence while the other is free to do its unscientific fantasizing without any need to provide actual proof.
I mean after they have proven that the Earth will not be swallowed by a black hole when they perform the experiments, what next?
Prove that a dimensional gate will not open, letting in Yog-Sothoth from the great beyond.
Prove that the collision will not exterminate the (ultra-rare) unicorns.
Prove that the collider doesn't employ Goa'uld technology.
It never ends.
Meanwhile, said doomsayers carry mobile phones in their pockets even though it hasn't been proven that the radiation doesn't cause infertility and cancer. They drive cars even though the probability of getting killed that way is many orders of maginitude higher than the black hole forming hypothesis...
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
>> proud motherland of the apes, chimpanzees, macaques, baboons
Not to mention humans.
PS Crack a dictionary, read the definition of "niggle." But then again a mind that operates at your level is easily distracted by shiny objects and rhyming words, I suppose.
THE SORCERER'S APPRENTICE (Score:3, Interesting)
...Or "Knowing Enough to Be Dangerous".
Stay tuned, as Rocky and Bullwinkle court certain doom!
Re: (Score:2)
You and what army are going to hold them accountable when they destroy the planet?
Yeah. Exactly.
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.
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
AFAIK, Hawking radiation has a very very small rate of loss, a lot less then, for example, light reflected off the moon. If it wasn't so we could see black holes.
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.
Re:Bogus (Score:4, Insightful)
First things first: I'm not an alarmist, and I don't think the LHC will blow up the Earth.
That said, I'd like to point out that not nearly all of that 10^20 eV is available to make new particles/black holes in the center of mass frame of the collision. Since all the collision products will have to have a ton of momentum in the direction that the cosmic ray was originally traveling, the available energy for creating new, potentially dangerous particles scales with the square root of the product of the energies (see http://www-bd.fnal.gov/public/relativity.html [fnal.gov] for a pretty good explanation of where this square root dependency comes from).
In contrast, the LHC will collide two particles in the TeV range head-on, which means the collisions have more of a chance of creating an "exotic" than even a 10^20 eV particle hitting stationary atmosphere.
However, I bet two high-energy cosmic rays each with energy > 10^14eV sometimes collide with *each other*, and that collision would have more available energy than the LHC collisions. The big question is how often does this happen? If collisions like these happen at a slow enough rate, I could imagine that the LHC might put Earth into unexplored territory in terms of numbers of collisions with ~10^14eV of available (i.e. not constrained to producing products with high momentum) energy.
I trust that the physicists have worked out the rates of these head-on, two-cosmic-ray collisions. Otherwise they would have no right saying that cosmic ray history shows that the LHC will be safe. Still, the only defense based on cosmic rays I've heard has been talking about cosmic rays hitting atmosphere, which isn't valid. Does anyone have a good link to a website analyzing the frequency of head-on two-cosmic-ray collisions?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Really a footnote, but a very high-energy collision with a stationary object like you describe would be more worrisome, since whatever exotic matter would be created could possibly move at relativistic speeds, increasing their half life by the Lorentz factor.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What's a low-momentum, high-energy particle, 50% the speed of light rather than 5 nines the speed of light?
Non-relativistic particles shouldn't be impossible. If the momenta of both colliding particles are equal and opposite, the sum momenta of the resulting "debris" will be 0. Though, even at speeds like 95% of the speed of light, the Lorentz factor is pretty negligible when it comes to extending the life of the particles. It's measurable, but it won't make them survive for hours and days when they were supposed to live for nanoseconds.
Re:Bogus (Score:4, Informative)
A nitpick, you misjudged the head-on situation vs the stationary target situation. Via Relativity you can always translate the collision into an equal head-on collision frame of reference. The only thing that matters is the total collision velocity (aka total energy). Two head-on particles is equal to one particle with twice the energy at a stationary target. The double energy of a head-on collision is nowhere near comparable to the hundreds-of-thousands of times higher energy of a cosmic ray.
The only difference shows up when the collision products spray against the surrounding earth-reference-frame matter. Both collisions would spray a spherical fireball in the collision reference frame, but in the earth frame the stationary target collision would look like a sharply directional cone spray of products.
-
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The question is whether the beams can supply a black hole with enough mass that it passes the turning point and is able to grow further from the mass absorbed by falling through Earth's crust.
Atoms are about 1e-10 m apart, and the Schwartzchild radius is 1.48e-27 m/kg. So unless the LHC boffins plan to accelerate over a million billion tonnes of matter through the collider, the answer is no.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Not to mention the any blackhole produced will be traveling at the speed of light minus a smidgen and have a mass just a smidgen above zero, so when it's 1 second lifetime expires it'll be halfway to the moon's orbit anyways! Those blackholets will be traveling about 3.5 million times the Earth's escape velocity.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm aware of the tongue and cheek nature of this post, but I'm also not a theoretical physicist, so can someone tell me if the current body of knowledge indicates any way to contain a black hole? In other words, it's impossible to put a charge on a black hole, right?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Charge is maintained. You can't destroy a negative without also destroying an equal positive.
Therefore if you shoot a lot of electrons into the black hole it will develop a charge and the charge can be manipulated.
After it has a charge you just need to shoot equal positive and negative charges