Black Holes Grow By Eating Quantum Foam 164
An anonymous reader writes "The discovery that even the most distant galaxies have supermassive black holes at their cores is a puzzle for astrophysicists. These objects must have formed relatively soon after the Big Bang. But if a galaxy is only a billion years old and contains a black hole that is a billion times more massive than the Sun, how did it get so big, so quickly? Now one cosmologist says he has the answer: black holes feed off the quantum foam that makes up the fabric of spacetime. This foam is 'nourishing' because it contains quantum black holes that can contribute to the black hole's growth. This idea leads to a prediction: that the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way must also be growing in this way and at a rate that we should be able to measure. Just watch out for the burps."
Quantum foam? (Score:2)
I thought supermassive black holes grew by sucking superstars into them.
Re:Quantum foam? (Score:5, Funny)
No. Those are "groupies".
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Their quantum mother slaps them when they try to chew on the quantum foam.
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Con CERN (Score:2)
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I'm not sure there are many supermassive black holes in our vicinity, so I think we're probably safe.
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" There was some concern of the hypothetical danger creation of such black holes might pose.
not my anyone who know WTF they where talking about.
Re:Con CERN (Score:4, Interesting)
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Why calculate when you can find it experimentally. Think of the fun!
Re:Con CERN (Score:5, Interesting)
There was some concern of the hypothetical danger creation of such black holes might pose.
More concerning to me was the uninformed speculation that lead to those concerns. As one physicist quipped here on Slashdot at the time, "You misunderstand what motivates physicists. If the LHC did get sucked up by a mini black hole we would not run from the building in fear, we would run towards it with notebooks at hand".
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If the LHC did get sucked up by a mini black hole we would not run from the building in fear, we would run towards it with notebooks at hand".
Only the experimental physicists. The theoretical physicists would ignore the black hole until their equations proved it exists.
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If a massive star can't do this, how would there be really small "mini" black holes?
Either it can stop light from escaping (therefore it is incredibly massive) or it can't (therefore it is not black).
If you see my angle here
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It's the mass to size ratio that is relevant here.
If you manage to compress an object the mass of the Himalayas (i.e. a minuscule mass on an astronomical scale) way down to the size of an elementary particle, you end up with a black hole in your laboratory. Enjoy, but enjoy quick, as the thing will start to eat your laboratory immediately...
Should you prefer to make a black hole out of Grandpa's old lawn mower instead, just make sure to compress it down to a far, far tinier size than you'd have compressed t
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If super massive black holes behaved like raccoons when you leave cat food out, it might become a problem.
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Dietary Puzzle (Score:1)
How you get so big eating food of this kind?
Nothing but an extremely long (in our terms) cycle (Score:1)
I will be glad when they figure out that this is all just one huge (multitrillion year) cycle. Everything will eventually get sucked into the various holes; the larger holes will over power the small holes and suck them in until there is nothing left but one hole that eventually sucks our concept of time in to it until there only exists an extremely small and massively dense blob that reaches critical mass... at which point there is another big "bang" setting the entire process in motion again. Redistribut
Re:Nothing but an extremely long (in our terms) cy (Score:5, Informative)
Doesn't work - the big bang is not an expansion into pre-existing spacetime. Further, it's very hard to find a way of forcing a black hole solution of GR (Schwarzschild would be the most plausible in this context) to suddenly turn into a cosmological ("Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker") solution of GR. What you *can* do is embed an FLRW solution inside a Schwarzschild and get a model indistinguishable from observation, but extraordinarily contrived, and indeed pointless. (Come to that I'm not fully convinced those models genuinely work because the Schwarzschild solution is static, but if you linked that with Wetterich's recent model where the "expansion" is actually a manifestation of the increasing mass of particles you could avoid that issue, too and, indeed, avoid having to embed an FLRW inside a Schwarzschild at all.)
But if you refine what you say a bit it's not very far from an idea Penrose proposed a while back but has, unfortunately, never published in detail, although he's put out some (admittedly extremely ill-advised -- Penrose is basically a genius, but knows little of either statistics or observation) papers claiming signatures on the microwave sky. Basically Penrose points out that eventually everything will evaporate to radiation one way or another: if we follow any extension to the standard model we at least open the possibility that fundamental particles can decay, and otherwise ultimately every path every particle will take will inevitably, over an infinite period of time, take it into a black hole. If there are eventually two electrons in the universe and nothing more but radiation, they will themselves inevitably collide, after an unimaginable period, with enough energy to form a black hole (remember in this scenario the electrons are constantly buffeted by radiation of ridiculously high power... even if most of the radiation is at wavelengths of, say 10m, there will be *some* photons at a vast energy and these will interact with the electrons... eventually... and accelerate them to speeds far in excess of those reached on Earth or, indeed, in the Sun). And black holes radiate. So everything becomes radiation. But for reasons that are rather technical, it is impossible within the framework of GR to distinguish between an infinite future bathed in radiation and an infinite *past* bathed in radiation, because time and length scales become rather arbitrary. Which means that through some process Penrose has never explicated - if that's a word - the ultimate future can wrap onto the ultimate past and suddenly there's a new Big Bang.
There are also other ways of getting cyclic models, which involve a bit more new physics (new scalar fields, or branes hanging near ours, etc.) but a bit less hand-waving. Indeed, there are many ways of getting cyclic universes. But Penrose's struck me as being nearest to your suggestion.
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Which means that through some process Penrose has never explicated - if that's a word - the ultimate future can wrap onto the ultimate past and suddenly there's a new Big Bang.
(TIC)
So there is life after death, see ya all on the rebound.
What would one use to accelerate fast enough to get out of this time loop?
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Penrose is an advocate of mind is quantum magic, because otherwise my mad math skills would be bound by the laws of logic" -theory. I suggest a certain amount of scepticism regarding any claim of his which isn't accompanied by mathematical proof, especially when said claims would be equally at home in a New Age religious text. [wikipedia.org]
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I would certainly agree that we should take a position of extreme scepticism towards Penrose's claims that quantum gravity gives rise to consciousness.
My contention is that Penrose is one of the greatest general relativists of the mid-late 20th century, and has only been overlooked because Stephen Hawking is in a wheelchair. What I'd judge as Hawking's greatest successes - and they were very great - were in collaboration with Penrose (in the singularity theorems), in collaboration with Ellis (covariant flui
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"you are monopolizing, so I ask you directly."
Yeah, sorry :(
"how then can gravity escape, considering that the highs has measurable mass, in the gev range?"
The Higgs doesn't carry gravity. The Higgs field imparts mass to fundamental particles (and the Higgs boson is the particle associated with that field, though the particle itself does nothing for mass), but that is a very different thing. Quantum field theorists will describe gravity by *gravitons*, which are also bosons but where the Higgs has spin 0 --
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In the way you mean it, it doesn't. The event horizon is just that - anything inside of it doesn't interact with anything outside of it. It's simply where the name comes from. A 4-dimensional point in spacetime was dubbed an "event", so two regions of spacetime which can't see each other -- at any point in spacetime -- were said to be separated by an "event horizon". So a blackhole doesn't interact with anything, basically by its very nature.
However, it *does* cause a big curvature in spacetime. The main po
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Depends very much on your model of dark energy. I'll go a bit out on a limb and say that we don't have anything approaching a convincing model of dark energy right now, with the best we have being that a cosmological constant exists. We do understand the spacetime of a black hole embedded in a universe with a cosmological constant - it's known as Schwarzschild-de Sitter space - and while that doesn't say how a universe of black holes and a c.c. behaves it's pretty telling that nothing extraordinary happens.
Strike against Hawking Radiation? (Score:2)
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No, in the simplest case it gives you a population model. What you've said could be crudely mapped onto a foxes hares model to read "If hares can grow by breeding how could foxes ever kill them all?" What we'd end up with is oscillations or balances, depending on the parameters. Personally, I'd suspect that any balance between consumption and evaporation would kick in around roughly the Planck scale but that really is a knee-jerk guess.
So (Score:1)
So they will grow forever until the universe is one giant black hole?
Information Problem? (Score:2)
Since the entropy of a black hole is proportional to the area of the event horizon, and this is a reflection of the information content of the black hole, is there an issue with the information situation? Does the quantum foam that spontaneously creates these micro black holes inside the event horizon represent information? Or is there an information quandary implicit in this proposal?
Yuck! (Score:2, Funny)
Quantum foam? They can eat all they want. I tried that stuff once, it was awful.
Re:Yuck! (Score:5, Funny)
It's not the Quantum foam's fault. It was both awful and terrific tasting until you measured (tasted) it.
Or, to quote Professor Farnsworth: You changed the result by measuring it!
Does Quantum Foam Have Density? (Score:3)
I'm not up on the details of contemporary physics, but it occurs to me that since the universe is supposed to have been expanding since the big bang, the overall density has decreased during that time. Does space/time and the Quantum Foam also have a density that might affect the rate at which super massive black holes could gobble it? Could conditions in the early universe encourage black hole growth/consolidation more than the current space environment?
Black hole growth via this method may still occur today, and be measurable in our own and nearby galaxies, but the rate may be so slow that it is hidden by other factors, e.g.: consumption of local stars/gas clouds.
Re:Does Quantum Foam Have Density? (Score:4, Insightful)
Nice post.
"it occurs to me that since the universe is supposed to have been expanding since the big bang, the overall density has decreased during that time"
Yes, absolutely.
"Does space/time and the Quantum Foam also have a density that might affect the rate at which super massive black holes could gobble it?"
Yes; one would normally link it to what I guess would be called the Planck density. (We have a Planck energy and a Planck length, which imply a Planck volume, so a Planck density would be the Planck energy / c^2 divided by the Planck volume. Forgive me not going through the algebra but it would probably be a few minutes' work on Wikipedia; the important point is that a fundamental volume associated with the quantum gravitational scale probably exists. Or may exist.)
"Could conditions in the early universe encourage black hole growth/consolidation more than the current space environment?"
Certainly. If nothing else, higher energies - and a higher density is immediately a higher energy through E=mc^2 - would most likely lead to a high production of black holes. Maybe not, but what we *can* say is that higher energies leads to a higher abundance of primordial black holes through more standard processes, so that even if the foam black holes are *not* preferentially produced in the extremely early universe, other black holes actually are, so the absorption rate will be higher anyway.
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I'd say "ignorant" rather than "stupid", making clear that "ignorance" is not perjorative. No-one should ever be ashamed of admitting ignorance, and no-one should ever call themselves stupid for asking an honest question :) I probably can't answer your questions to anything like your satisfaction because I'm bouncing well against the limits of my own ignorance, but at least I might have a slightly clearer perception of things (and therefore make much larger mistakes...)
"If black holes form in the quantum fo
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it has density and no density at the same time
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I thought you were describing a quantum Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, myself.
Crap, now I'm hungry.
Quantum foam just joined Dark matter, energy as FM (Score:3)
One astrophysicist now claims Black Holes are made by Freaking Magic...
This comes after NuSTAR found Black Holes "wherever it looked" {my words}, ""We found the black holes serendipitously," explained David Alexander, "We were looking at known targets and spotted the black holes in the background of the images."" anywhere between 0.3 and 11.4 billion light-years from Earth. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130909154918.htm [sciencedaily.com]
NuSTAR http://www.nustar.caltech.edu/ [caltech.edu] and http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/nustar/main/index.html#.UjDw25I03n0 [nasa.gov]
Now it's a race to explain this, and in the lead is Marco Spaans with mini black holes aka "Quantum uctuations in the form" that I would
tend to think would of made itself more pronounced than just adding substance to a Black Hole.
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So we have:
* Dark Energy
* Dark Matter
* Dark Gravity
* Dark Foam
* Dark Holes
* Dark Profit!
"I didn't eat the cake, honey, a Dark Mouth ate it."
End of the Universe (Score:5, Interesting)
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FWIW I like your explanation, simple concise, logical.
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I just had a radical thought.
It's probably wrong, as it is the product of ignorance. As such nothing that follows should be seen as factual. It is supposition. And again, probably very wrong.
Still, What if the physical volume of spacetime is far larger than it currently appears, the force driving spacetime expansion is the energy that creates vacuum fluctuations entering the true ground state (as more spacetime that has fewer fluctuations), and the currently observed universe's rate of expansion is an illus
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If black holes grow by the absorbing the quantum foam, then the universe is slowly gaining mass as new matter is spontaneously being generated but not getting a chance to vanish back to where it came from.
The quantum foam is still just a conversion from energy to matter (and normally back to energy again)
Any mass gained as matter had to come from mass of energy, so the net sum is zero, not gaining.
This quantum foam... (Score:1)
This quantum foam is going to go right to my Schwartzchild radius.
Does this metric make me look supermassive?
Black holes older than the current universe (Score:2)
Instead of hyperinflation expanding faster than light in the first microseconds, perhaps our Bang opened into a pre-existing "cavity" of a few light-minutes across. Perhaps we
Re: Great Attractor meets Great Repulsor? (Score:1)
Sort of like the ancient Tai Chi Yin-Yang symbol which has a tiny yang white dot in the center of the 'full' black yin part and a tiny black yin dot in the center o the 'full' yang part. Okay, so yes, maybe I did reread those Dancing Wu Li Masters books in the last little bit.
Seems simple to me (Score:2)
Doesn't it violate the laws of thermodynamics? (Score:4, Interesting)
In Physics we learn that energy/matter cannot be created or destroyed, just change form, and that the universe is a closed system where the total energy/matter is static.
Recently we have also learned that virtual particles are constantly appearing and then disappearing and the void of space is not really a void but a boiling soup of virtual particles. But since these particles disaappear instantly after they appear, the net result is that the universe's energy/matter quantity does not change.
However, the idea in this article claims the opposite: virtual particles, i.e. the quantum foam, does not disappear, but it is added instead to the energy/matter of the universe, thus making the universe an open system. Isn't that a violation of the known physics laws?
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I think it really helps to remember that thermodynamics is an *emergent* theory: it's only valid when you're talking about vast numbers of particles. There is nothing, for instance, that stops a few electrons -- even in isolation -- grossly violating the second law of thermodynamics and settling into a state of vanishingly low entropy. Just that, when you look at larger systems they will never, as a system, move to a state of lower entropy.
Putting it another way, look at the gas bouncing around your room ri
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You're more than welcome, thank you for appreciating them. (I did my Masters thesis on acoustic holes in Bose-Einstein condensates, and while I've forgotten most of the details myself I can still be a massive bore on the topic :) )
With acoustic holes probably the easiest scenario is to imagine a sheet of water running downhill, getting faster the whole time. It's important that there is no turbulence and virtually no friction so that the inside of the sheet is basically a "perfect fluid". (This is impossibl
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this is completely wrong (Score:2)
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Yeah (Score:2)
Re:foist pwost! (Score:4, Funny)
we're gonna need a bigger ringworld!
Quantum foam leaving a ring around the cosmic tub?
This is a job for Doug Adams, not Larry Niven!
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Actually, I feel a Stephen Baxter book coming. If only he would stop writing about dang mammoths.
Sorry for the OT.
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So... what do you think of the quantum foam that makes up the fabric of spacetime? The scientificness of such a thing is astounding, yes?
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I think it is Mathturbation. Like string theory.
Re:Mass vs Size (Score:5, Funny)
Why do people equate mass with size? Because they've met your mom.
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A wise man once said, "The mass of the ass is inversely proportional to the angle of the dangle."
Unless you're Sir Mix-A-Lot, then it's a dirty lie propagated by Cosmo.
Fitting CAPTCHA: "playboy"
Re:Mass vs Size (Score:5, Informative)
In the case of a black hole? Because the radius of the event horizon - which is one of the easiest definitions of the "size" of a black hole - grows monotonically with the mass. You can see it from Newtonian physics; if you look at the distance at which a "particle" travelling at the speed of light can't escape from a body with mass M you find it grows linearly with M. It turns out, rather coincidentally, that this coincides with the event horizon of a Schwarzschild hole, which is a black hole which is perfectly spherical (ie non-rotating), uncharged black hole.
(I went looking for a reference but I gave up quickly. Basically take Newton's gravitational law, F=GMm/r^2 for a large body of mass M and an orbiting (test) body of mass m. A particle of velocity c moving in a circular orbit is experiencing a radial force of F=mv^2/r=mc^2/r. (This is the centrifugal force, and to head of pedants, in the frame of the particle it is very much experienced even if in an inertial frame it is evidently fictional.) Equating these two you quickly find GM/r=c^2, or r=GM/c^2. This is the Schwarzschild radius.)
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Fail, off by a factor of two for the classical answer.
And first link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_velocity
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oh whatever, a factor of two compared to entirely the wrong answer... it gives some intuition, at least. feel free to log on and mod me overrated :)
Re:Mass vs Size (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Mass vs Size (Score:5, Informative)
The background temperature of space is 2.7K, measured to exquisite accuracy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_Background_Explorer). You might be referring to the dark energy problem, which is pretty much ill-defined, meaning we don't actually have an explanation or, indeed, even an agreement on the size of the discrepancy (which is commonly quoted as 10^120 but is actually much nearer 10^60... not that that's good.) Although you're likely referring to the string landscape, where you can get something like 10^10^100 unique vacua, or more, or maybe a few more than that, or a few more again. Which while the dark energy problem is ill-defined at least it's related - via a few assumptions, to be fair - to observation. The string landscape is entirely theoretical and relies on you accepting both string theory and the arguments that lead to the landscape - and those are much more controversial than the simple statement that the standard cosmological model does not work without a surprisingly large quantity that acts more or less like a dark energy.
Re:Mass vs Size (Score:4, Informative)
That number is called "googol", not "google".
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Works for NASA anyway...well...almost [cnn.com].
Re:Mass vs Size (Score:4, Informative)
With one difference though: Once you apply GTR equations, the r is twice the value you get from Newtonian calculations.
Re:Mass vs Size (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, true. But like I said to the other AC who made the same (totally valid - people with mod points might want to mod these people informative, btw, so those who ignore ACs might see it) point, it's close enough for government work and it's good intuition.
But yes, both of you are right, the Newtonian calculation isn't entirely right. I should have thought a bit more carefully about what I was saying.
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Head off pedants
You're welcome ;)
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haha two whacking mistakes in a post that claimed it wanted to avoid pedants. i have to try harder in future...
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Indeed, given that black holes famously have no hair, we can't find anything more than mass, angular momentum and charge.
And, as you say, right now we have very little chance of measuring the angular momentum or charge of a black hole, while the mass is relatively straightforward...
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What if the black hole swallowed a really really large amount of Rogaine? Would it still have no hair?
[Yes, I know what Thorne and Hawking meant by the original phrase. Deal with it]
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How many of them fit on the head of a pin?
Re:Isn't this (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it's actually close to the exact opposite, though both are quantum effects. In loose terms, Hawking's argument is that if you generate a pair of particles just outside of the black hole (which is allowed by the energy/time uncertainty principle so long as their lifetime - before they recollide - is short enough), and one falls through the event horizon and the other escapes, then they can *never* recombine -- and then you're left with a net negative energy. That negative energy has to come from somewhere, and it comes from the black hole. Which means that the black hole radiates energy -- Hawking radiation -- and eventually will evaporate.
The argument here is quite different, although it's still a quantum effect; instead of virtual pairs here, we simply have a black hole gobbling up unimaginably small black holes that foam in and out of existence. There is no net energy loss with these, and rather than losing mass/energy, the black hole *gains* it. I'd be interested in a study seeing whether these two effects would ever balance -- I'd imagine they probably would, somewhere near the Planck scale, but that's nothing more than a speculative assumption.
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The scientists at CERN have always told us that any mini black holes they create with their collider would immediately evaporate, so don't worry. Now it turns out that they could grow instead?!
That means that we're still at risk for this entire planet suddenly being swallowed up at any mo - *
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If they're having to look at it with supermassive black holes -- and the abstract of the paper says the hole at the centre of the Milky Way has grown *exponentially* to its current mass -- then the timescales involved are large. We may balance against Hawking radiation but I don't think we have to fear a black hole at CERN.
(Moreover, the models that predicted black holes at the LHC were themselves extraordinarily speculative, and even were they true, which I think no-one actually would suggest, would almost
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> The "danger" of black holes at CERN was almost entirely manufactured by the media. Almost.
Even if you're 99% sure an old bomb will never explode, it's still not a good idea to kick it.
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We're talking more like being more sure that the world will end because it will suddenly mutate into jelly than because CERN will make a black hole that will grow and eat up everyone and then (most bewilderingly) continue growing and eat the universe.
Re:Isn't this (Score:4, Funny)
Such flippant remarks... We're talking about the Earth being destroyed by laboratory professionals, and not pondering over why exactly it is we're mysteriously long overdue for an otherwise regular mass extinction event, coincidentally around the time complex life showed promise in direction of sentience. Look, they have big brains too, so why aren't the dolphins on speaking terms with us? Because they're not real dolphins.
I don't think you grasp the gravity of the situation.
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You raise an extremely worrying argument :( I think we should watch closely to see when all the dolphins vanish. Instead of monitoring the internet we can set the NSA and GCHQ into decoding their last messages to us.
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We are not overdue for a mass extinction event. One is going on around us. It is due to the increase in the human race and we are wiping out species like nothing else. Add in global warming and it will continue for quite a while.
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Not only that, but you talking about a neutrally charge object that was created by two objects moving near the speed of light and that probably hit at an angle, meaning this blackhole will more than likely pass right through the Earth and zoom out into space. And even if it doesn't, and it falls to the center of the
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If a black hole generated by the LHC could grow to eat the earth, it probably would have happened already. The LHC is basically working at the same energies equal to cosmic rays striking the earth's atmosphere. You'd think that after 4.5 billion years of cosmic rays hitting things like this planet, the sun, the other planets, etc. that a black hole would be here by now.
Thus, based on our present existence and the existence of all these stars and other material out in space, either the black holes are not be
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The LHC is basically working at the same energies equal to cosmic rays striking the earth's atmosphere.
Within a factor of a few tens of millions [wikipedia.org], you are right.
You'd think that after 4.5 billion years of cosmic rays hitting things like this planet, the sun, the other planets, etc. that a black hole would be here by now.
What about speed relative to the earth? A black hole produced from a cosmic particle will be produced from a stationary particle being hit, and will thus have a high momentum, easily enough to escape the earths gravity well before interacting with anything. A black hole produced at CERN will be produced from two particles travelling at nearly the same speed in opposite directions, so it will be travelling much slower. Or will it still have a high enou
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The LHC is basically working at the same energies equal to cosmic rays striking the earth's atmosphere.
Within a factor of a few tens of millions [wikipedia.org], you are right.
Nope, GP was right. The centre-of-mass energy in collisions of UHE cosmic rays with our atmosphere is of the order (slightly above) of the centre-of-mass energies reached at the LHC. That's another reason why we build colliders: it's hard to reach high energies in fixed-target collisions.
You'd think that after 4.5 billion years of cosmic rays hitting things like this planet, the sun, the other planets, etc. that a black hole would be here by now.
What about speed relative to the earth? A black hole produced from a cosmic particle will be produced from a stationary particle being hit, and will thus have a high momentum, easily enough to escape the earths gravity well before interacting with anything. A black hole produced at CERN will be produced from two particles travelling at nearly the same speed in opposite directions, so it will be travelling much slower. Or will it still have a high enough speed that it doesn't matter?
Don't forget that the LHC is colliding the quarks and gluons inside the protons, and the speed (momentum, you mean of course) of the incoming particles is never mathematically equal. Still, you have a valid point, this is a
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The growth of a black hole is a process that takes place on a completely different time scale than the evaporation of the black hole as proposed by Hawking.
The eventual evaporation of a black hole of astronomical size will take many magnitudes more time than the one that has passed since the Big Bang.
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Well, certainly this is speculative physics but in this field that's not really something to attack - merely something to be aware of. We don't have a properly working quantum theory of gravity to understand what's actually going on down at this level, so this kind of paper is simply reasoning something that would happen were a particular set of assumptions valid.
Black holes on smaller scales would almost certainly exist, but it does depend on what you mean by "smaller", of course. I don't think anyone woul
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No, the reasoning is: "If P, then Q, and if not P, then most likely not Q. Therefore if Q, then most likely P."
It's the same way how you conclude that if there are footprints in the sand, that there was someone walking through the sand. If someone walked through the sand, then he would have left such footprints, and we don't know any other reasonable process which would have caused the same footprints.
Of course the footprints don't prove in the mathematical sense that someone was walking there. After all, w
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Also we can't exclude that someone was walking through the sand... backwards. Just saying.
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Very true. And all theories about the real world are either false or undecidable.
Now, at the real world, we like to qualify that undecidable set.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Love the new religion (Score:4, Informative)
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Agreed. Why do you think Max Planck said:
* A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
* Science progresses funeral by funeral.
Wait till Scientists discover White Holes in a few years ... its gonna be a field day for astrophysics. :-)
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And suddenly we have a perfect way to summarize the WH40k universe...