The LHC, Black Holes, and the Law 467
KentuckyFC writes "Now that the physicists have had their say over the safety of the Large Hadron Collider, a law professor has produced a comprehensive legal study addressing the legal issue that might arise were a court to deal with a request to halt a multi-billion-dollar particle-physics experiment (abstract). The legal issues make for startling reading. The analysis discusses the problem with expert witnesses, which is that any particle physicists would be afraid for their livelihoods and anybody else afraid for their lives. How can such evidence be relied upon? It examines the well established legal argument that death is not a redressable injury under American tort law, which could imply that the value in any cost-benefit analysis of the future of the Earth after it had been destroyed is zero (there would be nobody to compensate). It asks whether state-of-the-art theoretical physics is really able to say that the LHC is safe given that a scientific theory that seems unassailable in one era may seem naive in the next. But most worrying of all, it points out that the safety analyses so far have all been done by CERN itself. The question left open by the author is what verdict a court might reach."
We'll save the justice system first.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:We'll save the justice system first.... (Score:5, Funny)
Shakespeare called and he doesn't like your scenario.
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Schrodinger's Attorney? (Score:4, Funny)
I know there's a joke in there somewhere, I just can't quite figure it out.
Re:Schrodinger's Attorney? (Score:5, Funny)
I know there's a joke in there somewhere, I just can't quite figure it out.
Not Schrodinger's Attorney. Maxwell's DA [wikipedia.org].
See, when you make humourous reference to Maxwell, the joke and the punchline are effortlessly sorted into the right order. With Schrodinger jokes, on the other hand, you never know whether it's going to be funny or not until you tell it, and by then it's too late.
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A 2 :The cat.
Would you want to spend half of an eternity locked up with a lawyer?
No.
Neither would the cat (assuming that the cat is an intelligent rational being; their ready acquisition of staff instead of masters supports the idea that they are intelligent and rational). So, the cat would do something about the situation.
This same logic has been used to show that (Schrodinger's) cat has learned how to travel in time. Presuma
Re:We'll save the justice system first.... (Score:5, Funny)
Shakespeare called and he doesn't like your scenario.
Shakespeare? I believe it was Ripley that said things about "from orbit" and "to be sure". Although she was talking about something a lot easier to eradicate than lawyers...
Re:We'll save the justice system first.... (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, in the original context [spectacle.org], that "kill all the lawyers" line is in praise of lawyers, for they are obstacles to a tyrant's plans.
No it was a praise to tyrant's since they kill lawyers. .
Re:We'll save the justice system first.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, this is relevant because in the event of an LHC-created black hole destroying the planet, we will of course launch into space a "lifeboat" containing a judge, defense and plaintiff lawyers, Rusty the Bailiff to keep everyone in line, and one token normal person to be the plaintiff. Justice will be served no matter what the damage to the planet is.
I seem to recall that some physics thought that before the Trinity Explosion, that perhaps an atom explosion would vaporise the entire atmosphere.
One guy on the site is even ranting about the LHC actually being a "quark cannon", and says that (paraphrasing) "cosmic rays are single atoms" and in the same sentence (because it's a runon, like this one) that we've never observed a quark in cosmic rays. All credibility is lost with that, and that's the problem with even debating this issue... the average person has no real decent understanding of the actual risks involved, but if they know about it, they get all paranoid, and someone breaks out the SciFi.
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Re:We'll save the justice system first.... (Score:5, Funny)
Fast enough for ya? [unpronounceable.com]
Re:We'll save the justice system first.... (Score:4, Informative)
It only has to escape an earth mass black hole, so about 12km/s will do.
Re:We'll save the justice system first.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey you are right! Your link returns 404.
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My bad: Try this one. [plasmaresources.com]
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I'm not qualified to judge the arguments of the guy behind that web site on their merits alone. However, I've also read his story [plasmaresources.com], and it seems that everyone he tried to correspond with regarding his theories quite openly said that he's wrong. If he is to be believed, there is in fact a "global conspiracy" of GR scientists that covers up for the non-existence of black holes and some other stuff (e.g. he also claims that Big Bang theory is fundamentally wrong).
Furthermore, he does seem to get pretty personal
Re:We'll save the justice system first.... (Score:5, Funny)
How fast will this lifeboat be traveling? If this lifeboat is to be escaping a black hole.. it'd have to be moving pretty fast.
Is it an African lifeboat or a European lifeboat?
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Law != Justice and it's European Law at that! (Score:3, Insightful)
LHC was designed to shed light on why there is matter at all in this universe.
No, it was designed to determine why fundamental particles have mass. It may shed some light on the matter/anti-matter imbalance but that is not its primary design goal.
But, matter is not all that matters, there is also justice.
Indeed there is. First it is worth mentioning that law is not the same as justice and never has been. It is a best approximation to the concept that we have come up with but laws are by no means always just. Additionally since the LHC is built in Europe and NOT the US it is European law/justice which is relevant. So frankly this study is n
I don't think this is worth doing. (Score:2)
Assuming the LHC destroys the world with the LHC itself getting swallowed first and all of Earth going next and eventuallyd swallowing the Solar System, what assets would they have left? You should know better than to sue somebody without assets, particularly when you can't hire a lawyer because all your money is gone, all the lawyers are gone, and for that matter, you're gone too.
Re:I don't think this is worth doing. (Score:5, Informative)
If it actually occuurred, an LHC black hole wouldnt swallow the solar system. It wouldnt even swallow the moon. It would have the same mass as the earth and would continue to follow roughly the same orbit (not accounting for solar wind and photon momentum).
Re:I don't think this is worth doing. (Score:4, Informative)
more likely it would have the same mass as an LHC, or rather a particle in the LHC which would almost certainly vaporize before it ran into another particle to swallow given the average density of particles on earth.
Re:I don't think this is worth doing. (Score:5, Informative)
Oh yeah, I agree completely. Chances are such a small singularity would pass through all other matter and not touch anything.
But on the outside chance that it did touch something and start growing, eventually consuming the earth, it would pretty much stop there. There's simply no other mass to pull in that isn't in a stable orbit.
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It's not the mass alone that makes something a black hole, it's the density. For an object of the same mass as Earth to be a black hole, it has to be really tiny. But since the Earth's mass is spread out across the Earth's volume, it's just a normal planet.
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oh well (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:oh well (Score:4, Funny)
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Please keep your mythological beliefs to yourself.
Tell that to all the Pastafarians on Slashdot who talk about Internet piracy in a climate change story or vice versa.
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Since no one has guessed it:
October 10th, 2010 is 10/10/10, or 101010 which is 42 in binary.
Bonus is that you can rearrange the 2 digit month/day/year any way you want and still get 42.
STFU (Score:5, Insightful)
The LHC will not destroy the world.
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If the LHC does turn out to be an "Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator", it will be the last and only comment. You win either way.
Given the European sense of humour, I'm a bit surprised the LHC wasn't called the "Illudium Q-36".
Re:STFU (Score:4, Informative)
That's entirely the attitude the article addresses: hubris. The scientists don't think that it will explode, but do you understand the issues involved or are you blindly listening to them? No one really understands string theory or what might happen when you smash particles at high energies. The chances are small that a major event would occur. However, if the LHC causes great damages, who pays? Would Anonymous Coward be held responsible?
Re:STFU (Score:5, Informative)
Re:STFU (Score:5, Funny)
but ... but ... but ... the LHC is on the French-Swiss border: that must affect the laws of physics somehow ...
Re:STFU (Score:5, Informative)
Correct.
The chances are small that a major event would occur.
Incorrect. For billions of years, the earth has been bombarded with energies higher than what the LHC is capable of producing. However, they were random in nature and couldn't be observed because they were gone before anyone knew they happened. The LHC approximates some of these larger collisions. They can do nothing there that hasn't happened trillions of times already. And if it was going to do something, it would have by now.
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</sarcasm>
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There are other possibilities, but even if you are right, history is not destiny.
What if it just blow up / messed up part of the ea (Score:2)
What if it just blow up / messed up part of the earth and not all of it how will the court look at that?
US LAW ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:US LAW ? (Score:4, Funny)
I think CERN would be declared an Terrorist Organization and the scientists individually deemed Enemy Combatants.
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True.
It's an interesting series of arguments, too bad the LHC's name and organization seems to be plugged into the argument to capitalize on the fear and hysteria about something that the LHC will never be able to do.
The LHC is simply not going to be able to make anything that swallows Earth. We know that because countless far more energetic particles hit Earth over a period of billions of years, and yet Earth still exists. The LHC just can't compete against that. The people that think otherwise might as
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Whoa there bucko. Sweden is next to France?!
With a big enough black hole I could "make it so".
Re:US LAW ? (Score:5, Funny)
...its in the France-Switzerland border...
Whoa there bucko. Sweden is next to France?!
I bet I can guess what country you're from.
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Re:US LAW ? (Score:5, Funny)
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The British kangaroo system of libel law is a prime example.
Not to defend the moronic state of libel law in this country, but many of the current problems are in large part down to case law created by one Judge: Mr Justice Eady.
Hopefully a government will find time to implement statute to override his dumb judgements, but libel law isn't a big political topic, and hey, whilst the judgements are stupid, they bring money into the British justice system from abroad...
Ugh (Score:5, Insightful)
It asks whether state-of-the-art theoretical physics is really able to say that the LHC is safe given that a scientific theory that seems unassailable in one era may seem naive in the next.
And yet again, a basic understanding of the fundamental scientific process causes people to say foolish things. "Previous scientific theories were proven wrong, so we shouldn't trust current theories" blah blah blah. Previous scientific theories weren't proven wrong, just incomplete, as has been said thousands upon thousands of time. Under restricted conditions, they are still "right"- in the scientific sense of the word, which is "matches observation to our more precise measurements". OK, so people want to make the, "LHC is an extreme condition and so outside the tested realm of theory." Yeah. No. Not at all. The exact same theory which predicts that black holes could be created predicts that they are also being constantly created in the earth's atmosphere. And the exact same theory predicts that they evaporate via Hawking radiation, etc. You don't get to have it both ways. And this is where people's arguments get really silly: "But, you could be completely wrong!" Yes. I suppose we could. But in that case, we could be wrong in an infinite number of ways. And an earth destroying black hole would require us to be wrong in a very specific way on par with, "Our knowledge of electricity could be wrong and some magical circuit with just the right components will end all of reality as we know it."
Arguing that theoretical physicists would be likely to be biased is, if possible, even dumber than the LHC panic arguments. You don't need a PhD to understand that the whole hysteria is retarded. In fact, suggesting that you do is creating a false dichotomy: either you need to be a particle physicist, or you're just taking their word for it. Seriously, this "analysis" will probably do more harm than good.
Now can we as a society please move on?
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Our knowledge of electricity could be wrong and some magical circuit with just the right components will end all of reality as we know it.
Ah, so you've read Steorn's business document.
Re:Ugh (Score:5, Funny)
So, care to calculate some epicycles for us?
Re:Ugh (Score:5, Insightful)
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So, care to calculate some epicycles for us?
Sure, just as soon as I can get some Phlogiston [wikipedia.org] to power my N-ray [wikipedia.org] generator.
...but wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
Epicycles were used because they had, wait for it, predictive power - the
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Epicycles had terrible predicting power, they had to be adjusted constantly and the adjustments required made the epicycle idea mostly unusable. At the same time when epicycles were in use others suggested that the idea can be simplified if the Earth is not taken to be the center (or halfway from the center to be precise) but if the Sun was to be the center of motion. This did not catch on until much later.
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Now can we as a society please move on?
If, perchance, they actually listened to your argument, I'd say "yes, next let's move on to patenting business models" except I'd be more worried about some equally unlikely shit happening.
Like the Earth being swallowed by a black hole.
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As a physicist, I'm not losing a lot of sleep over the LHC-ends-the-world scenario. However, I think you've overstated the case a little bit.
Here's what would have to happen for it to be the end of the world:
Going in circles (Score:5, Insightful)
The scientific theories that are relied upon to show the LHC is safe may eventually prove to be false, or at least short-sighted. However, these same theories are what led people to consider the possibility of black hole production in the first place. If those theories are taken away, then the reason for concern also disappears.
If we are going to take the prevailing theories to be unreliable, then all that remains is common sense. Someone might raise the concern that a car collision would lead to a devastating black hole, if it happened in exactly the wrong way. There is no reason to take this concern seriously given the number of accidents which the earth has already survived. Similarly, there is no reason to think that the LHC will produce anything more dramatic than the high-energy particle collisions occurring in our atmosphere every day.
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They are what we in the industry call "retarded"
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Are you trying to say that only one-fourth of Americans are retarded?
There. I fixed it for you.
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However, these same theories are what led people to consider the possibility of black hole production in the first place. If those theories are taken away, then the reason for concern also disappears.
What I haven't seen is a person that understand the current theories, argue for the possibility of a black hole that could swallow the earth being generated by the LHC. I choose to believe the people who understand the theories.
These arguments could be used with AGW too. (Score:3, Insightful)
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There's a fundamental problem with this... (Score:2)
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You misunderstand the meaning of the statement, it has the opposite implication.
Death is not redressable, which means if you do in fact destroy the entire planet the cost of doing so is 0. So you might as well go ahead and take the risk no matter how large.
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Say you find out on 1 Jan 2011 that the Earth will be swallowed by a brand new black hole on 1 Jan 2111. You spend the next 100 years working to move the human race to Mars and building new infrastructure there to support them. That 100 years of effort has a finite value which could be calculated. That way you know the cost of destroying the Earth.
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There's a morbid mathematical-legal job called an actuary who practices in dealing with the estimated worth of people. See, there's no value in a person's death, but what the person would have earned should they have not died at that point can be computed and awarded to to the estate in a wrongful death lawsuit. Go ask O.J. Simpson. The LAPD bungled the investigation to the point there was reasonable doubt in the criminal trial... but O.J. got held liable on the more-likely-than-not standard in the civil tr
Sssh! We're ok as long as we don't ask.. (Score:4, Funny)
Read the disclaimer (Score:2)
IN NO EVENT WILL THE LHC BE LIABLE TO ANY THIRD PARTY FOR ANY SPECIAL, COLLATERAL, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY, PUNITIVE, OR ENHANCED DAMAGES ("EXCLUDED DAMAGES"). EXCLUDED DAMAGES INCLUDE COSTS OF INSPECTION, REMOVAL, AND REPLACEMENT COSTS, REPROCUREMENT COSTS (INCLUDING MAGRATHEA'S ADMINISTRATIVE AND PERSONNEL COSTS) OF REPLACEMENT OR SUBSTITUTE PLANETS, LOSS OF GOODWILL, LOSS OF REVENUE OR PROFITS, AND LOSS OF USE, WITHOUT REGARD TO WHETHER LHC HAS BEEN NOTIFIED IN ADVANCE OF THE POSSI
Re:Read the disclaimer (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Read the disclaimer (Score:4, Funny)
As long as Magrathea has a backup I say we go for it.
In a way I blame certain scientists (Score:4, Interesting)
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I've never heard any physicist say such an absurd thing. Perhaps you are confusing them with creators of popular "science" fiction?
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Hey that reminds me, electrons and quarks don't have a size, they're singularities.
I thought strings have replaced the point singularities. Granted were talking the Planck distance here, but still not a dimensionless point.
Re:In a way I blame certain scientists (Score:5, Informative)
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Oh, yeah, I know. I've read three books on it now, and the main support seems to be "but the maths work so well!" :)
Then they get to the part about needing a particle accelerator with a diameter that could contain the Oort Cloud just to do basic tests. After that is the chapter on holographic theory, and I realize the theoretical physics world has basically gone completely wrong in the head.
But, hey, the maths work out! All those nasty zeros in infinities go away.
Re:In a way I blame certain scientists (Score:4, Informative)
Hey that reminds me, electrons and quarks don't have a size, they're singularities.
You fail at quantum mechanics.
Electrons aren't particles in any truly useful sense, they're waves. If they weren't, we wouldn't have electron orbitals and absolutely none of organic chemistry could work. (OK, they're quantized waves, which gives them some particulate characteristics, but not ones like "position" in any sense that matches the concept used for singularities.)
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GGP failed at QM because quarks and electrons are *not* singularities.
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Event horizon (Score:3, Informative)
electrons and quarks don't have a size, they're singularities.
Every singularity has a size, namely that of its surrounding event horizon [wikipedia.org].
Interesting and sobering. (Score:2)
Re:Interesting and sobering. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Interesting and sobering. (Score:5, Funny)
There's plenty of scientists who can discuss these topics rationally and humbly, they just make for really boring television.
The LHC webcams [cyriak.co.uk], on the other hand, make for really panic-inducing television.
Common sense required; hopeless... (Score:5, Informative)
The argument for safety is very simple, and it doesn't require a physicist to make it. Sadly, it does require common sense, which is likely to be absent in this case.
Anyway, here it is: the Earth has been--and continues to be--bombarded by cosmic rays of immensely greater energies than found in the LHC. After billions of years without incident, one can only conclude that any problems must not be very significant, as we are here after all.
We aren't off the hook though; even if the LHC may not be capable of destroying the Earth, the lawyers are certainly doing a fine job.
No (Score:2)
Is the LHC dangerous. Quite possibly. Will it destroy the world? Ask British physicist Brian Cox: "Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a twat."
I think that sums it up.
Re:No (Score:5, Interesting)
Brian Cox: "Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a twat."
To which I will invoke Clarke's first law [wikipedia.org]:
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
Arthur C Clarke would have loved this debate BTW. I am sorry he can't be here. I am off to read Childhoods End again.
Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)
I once asked a distinguished but elderly scientist whether there was a large elephant on my head. He said he thinks that a large invisible elephant sitting on my head is impossible. Since he is very probably wrong, that means it is more likely than not that I've had an elephant sitting on my head for many years and didn't know.
In other words, that's just silly. The LHC will produce smaller collisions than found in nature. It just does it where we can see the results. It has the same chance (I'll grant as non-zero) of destroying the planet as crashing the latest Ford over at the IIHS or NHTSA test sites. Just because no other crash has created a black hole among the tens of millions of automobile crashes in the wild and other test sites, doesn't mean the next one won't, right? The chance of that Ford making a black hole and consuming the earth is the same as the LHC. Except the LHC is approximating something that hasn't been done just tens of millions of times, but trillions of times or more. All without incident. Yet the one done by man will end the earth when all the ones in the wild never did? Sure, and the IIHS crash test will end the world as well.
Arthur C Clarke would have loved this debate BTW.
No one enjoys debating with the willfully ignorant. Arthur C Clarke included.
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Yet the one done by man will end the earth when all the ones in the wild never did?
The other ones were Natural. These new ones are made from harsh chemicals and might give the Earth cancer.
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1. There exist distinguished but elderly scientists who are strong atheists (that is, believe that God cannot exist).
2. Clarke's First Law.
Ergo, God exists.
Something seems a bit flawed there.
False premise (Score:4, Insightful)
Also the bit about "anybody else afraid for their lives". I am not afraid for my life.
I am neither a particle physicist nor afraid for my life, there is no problem.
I'm going with the probabilities... (Score:4, Insightful)
flying monkeys crawling out your rectum > LHC destroying the world > homosexual leprechaun giving you magical money tree that grows $100 bills for leaves and has cocaine filled nuts
Of course, it's kind of hard to prove any of those is absolutely impossible, but you sure can calculate them as having absurdly low odds.... (So low, that if you tried to count the zeros between the decimal point and the first non-zero digit you'd fall asleep long before you got to it. That's why scientists like using those funny looking math formulas most of the LHC haters can't understand.)
Sorry Slashdotters, but I'm getting sick of this paranoid ignorant jihad to crucify a rather expensive but potentially critical piece of research.
If you want to whine about how much money is being used, fine, it's a bloody lot. (Though it's less than the cost of 10 stealth bombers.)
If you want to whine about how 'pure research' isn't useful, fine. (When electricity was still in the 'pure research' stage and the question was raised as to what use was it, a famous scientist replied "what use is a baby"...)
If you want to spout conspiracy theories (yours or other peoples), please go back to your paranoid blogs and leave this stuff to people who actually passed grade school math and science classes without cheating. (Many slashdotters have actually passed college level classes on trig, calculus, and even physics.)
Now lawyers are jumping into the mess when they aren't asked to.
What are the lawyers going to do next, threaten to sue people for not preparing for the fantasized, err, 'predicted' 2012 world disaster?
At least these media spawned circuses keeps the reporters from investigating my secret genesplicing experiments to create parasitic miniaturized colon dwelling hybridized eagle-macaques.
Thanks, take a break, and laugh at the stupidity before you drown in it...
Maybe the scientists are worried too (Score:3, Interesting)
One would think the scientists are at least as worried about their lives as they are about their livelihood.
Can you imagine them saying "Let's destroy the planet so that we can get this grant."?
Doesn't really make any sense.
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Don't forget TimeCube.
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If you make a tiny black hole you start a race between evaporation and accretion. The black hole may well evaporate before it collects enough mass to be stable, but it is difficult to be completely sure about this. In theory the black hole can start from the mass of an atom and increase in mass to the mass of the Earth (plus us of course).
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If you make a tiny black hole you start a race between evaporation and accretion. The black hole may well evaporate before it collects enough mass to be stable, but it is difficult to be completely sure about this. In theory the black hole can start from the mass of an atom and increase in mass to the mass of the Earth (plus us of course).
I am not a physiscist, but...
The gravitational pull of a body with the mass of a sub atomic particle is not very great. It won't be sucking matter towards itself like a gravitational vacuum cleaner. Another particle would have to get extremely close to pass the event horizon:
According to google, the event horizon is 2GM/c^2:
So for a black hole with the mass of a proton:
(2 x 6.7 e -11 * 1.7 e -27) / (3.0 e+8 ** 2) = 2.5e-54 meter. That distance is about 2.1e-39 times smaller than the radius of the proton, or
Redundant (Score:5, Funny)
I think that "Redundant" mod refers to your use of "cockroaches" and "lawyers" as separate.
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Do you know why they bury lawyers twelve feet under rather than six?
Because deep down, they're really good people.
No, we didn't (Score:3, Funny)
Dear Mr. Layman,
We lawyers often have to quickly develop expertise in this or that technical subject depending on the case, and we have to know the subject matter cold in order to engage in meaningful examination of the witnesses. ("Isn't it true, Mr. Developer, that you typed 'i++' instead of '++i', causing the stack to overflow and necessitating a scram of the atomic pile?") You might remember the episode of "ER" where they had a lawyer who knew his medicine so well that the doctors would let him operate