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Tiny Black Holes Could Trigger Collapse of Universe—Except That They Don't 156

Posted by Soulskill from the less-than-comforting-reasoning dept.
sciencehabit writes: If you like classic two-for-one monster movies such as King Kong vs. Godzilla, then a new paper combining two bêtes noires of pseudoscientific scaremongers—mini black holes and the collapse of the vacuum—may appeal to you. Physicists working with the world's biggest atom-smasher—Europe's Large Hadron Collider (LHC)—have had to reassure the public that, even if they can make them, mini black holes, infinitesimal version of the ones that form when jumbo stars implode, won't consume the planet. They've also had to dispel fears that blasting out a particle called the Higgs boson will cause the vacuum of empty space to collapse. Now, however, three theorists calculate that in a chain reaction, a mini black hole could trigger such collapse after all.
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Tiny Black Holes Could Trigger Collapse of Universe—Except That They Don't More

Tiny Black Holes Could Trigger Collapse of Universe—Except That They Don't

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  • The Hoggs Bison? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Great, now I'm hungry!

  • Tiny black holes (Score:5, Informative)

    by rossdee ( 243626 ) on Monday August 03, 2015 @08:42AM (#50239783)

    Tiny black holes don't stick around for long due to the quantum uncertainty around the event horizon
    See Hawking Radiation

    • Re: Tiny black holes (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03, 2015 @08:46AM (#50239809)

      I believe what you are trying to say is:

      "God will not let us destroy his creation."

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Ihlosi ( 895663 )
        I believe what you are trying to say is:

        He's saying that if this was likely to happen, it would have happened quite a while ago and we wouldn't be having this conversation.

      • D'oh, incorrect mod!

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Even if they didn't, the rate at which they could consume the planet is miniscule. The Earth would be long-gone before the black hole had any appreciable effect.

      http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/our-solar-system/39-our-solar-system/the-earth/other-catastrophes/54-how-long-would-it-take-for-a-mini-black-hole-to-eat-the-earth-advanced

      • Even if they didn't, the rate at which they could consume the planet is miniscule.

        You realize you're ruining how many potential Hollywood movies?

        • I'd love for someone to make a major/blockbuster type movie about this, and have the black hole destroy everything about 25 minutes in. The movie would just stop, the lights would turn on, and that's that! They could CGI all the previews of the show so it wouldn't even cost that much to make.

        • Not to mention a nice SciFi story several decades ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

  • Except that they could (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    But whatever, I'd rather the world end doing science.

  • Maybe it's just me, but... (Score:4, Funny)

    by andyring ( 100627 ) on Monday August 03, 2015 @08:50AM (#50239839) Homepage

    I welcome our new microscopic black hole overlords!

  • Scaremongering. (Score:5, Informative)

    by locofungus ( 179280 ) on Monday August 03, 2015 @08:58AM (#50239889)

    There's nothing that the LHC (or any other conceivable accelerator that we could build at current technology levels) can do that the sun isn't already doing in the upper atmosphere (or in the centre of the sun)

    What the LHC brings is doing the collisions in a small, controllable space where it's (relatively) easy to measure what is happening.

    • Re:Scaremongering. (Score:5, Informative)

      by DoctorNathaniel ( 459436 ) <`moc.liamg' `ta' `ggat.leinahtan'> on Monday August 03, 2015 @09:09AM (#50239949) Homepage

      Not true. The collision energies in the sun are on the order of a few MeV - there's lots of them, but none at the TeV scale.

      However, you're right it's scaremongering: cosmic rays interact in the atmosphere at LHC energies all the time: same kinds of particles, same energy (and higher!) at a rate that's much higher than the LHC collisions, once you add up the entire globe. If high-energy p-p collisions caused a problem, the earth would have blown up long ago. Or Jupiter. Or all of the stars in the universe.

      So, it's pretty safe to assume that the LHC isn't doing anything that can possibly hurt us; it's going on already. (It's just not going on in the middle of a high-resolution particle tracker.)

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        I don't know if the OP intended it, but there is another side you're missing. There are TeV scale collision in the Sun, from the same kind of cosmic rays that hit the Earth also hit the Sun. It is an important part to a counterclaim to the argument that LHC is different because it has roughly (very roughly...) zero center of mass momentum, while cosmic rays have large momentum in our frame. While there is the possibility that reaction products of a cosmic ray hitting the Earth could have enough momentum

        • that would be much harder with other larger and/or denser bodies like Jupiter, the Sun, and white dwarfs.

          Actually the argument also used pulsars. These have densities at, or above, that of a nucleus. A blackhole produced at the surface of one would swallow the entire star due to the phenomenally large cross-section. Pulsars are easy to detect and since we have never yet observed a pulsar winking out of existence we can exclude dangerous black hole production.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Safe to say meant to refer to cosmic ray interactions in the upper atmosphere, not solar radiation. These may have particle energies millions of times (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray [wikipedia.org] ) what is produced in the LHC.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by bondsbw ( 888959 )

        But isn't the point that the energy of the collision is being bestowed upon a very small set of subatomic particles?

        The earth's core contains an unfathomable amount of energy. To my knowledge, the earth does not launch projectiles into solar escape trajectory. Yet humans have managed to launch such objects (Pioneer 10/11, Voyager 1/2, New Horizons) into solar escape trajectory using a relatively miniscule amount of energy coming from their rockets.

        It's about how the energy is concentrated, not the total a

        • Yes, exactly.

          The thing you're probably not aware of is that cosmic rays can be very high energy - recorded cosmic ray interactions have single-particle energies many magnitudes larger than the most powerful accelerators ever constructed. (I think the biggest recorded is around 3 Joules of energy in a single proton.) The LHC collision energies are comparable to a very common set of interactions from cosmic rays. And there's lots of cosmic rays, and they've been colliding with the earth for millennia witho

      • It's all bogus anyway, a blackhole conserves mass, charge and momentum, so
        1, how would you be able to tell a blackhole created out of a proton from a proton as our definition of a proton is basically a thingy with a certain resting mass and charge!
        2, the lorenz tranformations, depending on how you look at the thingy it could be a blackhole if its coming at you on axis, a proton if its off axis and if it's on a parallel path a blackhole that changes into a proton then back into a blackhole;
        So does that mean

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          1, how would you be able to tell a blackhole created out of a proton from a proton as our definition of a proton is basically a thingy with a certain resting mass and charge!

          This would be no different than any other particle physics interaction, which also all conserve energy, charge, and momentum. You look at the decay products and at what energies interactions happen at. The produced blackhole won't have the same rest mass as a proton anyway, because of the extra energy available from the collision.

          2, the lorenz tranformations, depending on how you look at the thingy it could be a blackhole if its coming at you on axis, a proton if its off axis and if it's on a parallel path a blackhole that changes into a proton then back into a blackhole;

          The existence of an event horizon is invariant and the same in all inertial frames. This is not a problem for blackholes under GR, regardless of them being small or large.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by azav ( 469988 )

      Exactly.

    • I dig your sig man, it has attractive properties that cannot be truly explained.

  • Did they check their math? (Score:4, Funny)

    by AltGrendel ( 175092 ) <`su.0tixe' `ta' `todhsals-ga'> on Monday August 03, 2015 @09:07AM (#50239939) Homepage
    You have to divide by zero when working with black holes.

  • Yes, (Score:5, Funny)

    by azav ( 469988 ) on Monday August 03, 2015 @09:12AM (#50239969) Homepage Journal

    They evaporate first before eating the entire universe.

    Quite polite of them, I must say.

  • "Within a fraction of second, the bubble would then expand to consume the entire visible universe."

    So, we can now communicate faster the light by modulating Higgs field, instead of torturing kings.
    http://www.goodreads.com/quote... [goodreads.com]

  • Their age estimate is wrong (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Muad'Dave ( 255648 ) on Monday August 03, 2015 @09:32AM (#50240101) Homepage

    That barrier is so big that it would likely take many, many times the age of the universe for the transition to occur.

    No, it will take exactly one "age of the Universe" to tunnel and cause the collapse.

  • Any universe in which high energies could... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Monday August 03, 2015 @09:41AM (#50240167) Homepage

    ... destroy it due to local laws of physics would be destroyed at the moment of their formation when the energies tend to infinity. This may well have happened in the past (if you believe in the eternal inflation-collapse universe theory) or be happening (if you believe the multiverse theory) but since our universe is still here after 14 billion years I think its a safe bet that the laws of physics here don't allow it.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      No, ours just happens to be the one that survived. In a cosmology where potentially infinite "universes" can exist, the ones that succumb to universe destroying cataclysms, just stop earlier. By random chance, some will last longer, and some evidently last long enough to generate sentient life. Not that we can say that universe-destroying events do exist, but we certainly can't use our existence as evidence that they don't.

  • And cosmic rays are far more powerful than anythibng humans can create yet. Back tio the Whiteboard, folks.
  • What empty vacuum of space? Space is a quantity in itself. Obviously what used to be perceived as empty is swarming with all kinds of things we don't understand. We may have things like dark matter and dark energy and all kinds of super dark stuff that makes space some sort of dark solid with plenty of dark activity within. If we treat space as a quantity we need no magical suppositions about some under lying fabric of space. Said plainly just because we can not see it, sense it, or measure it in any

  • To prevent that the vacuum collapse spreads beyond LHC, just put it into a vacuum-vacuum flask!

  • Summoning virtual Higgs bosons into existence using the HLC may create mini black holes. (Meh, what could possibly go wrong?) A bubble of nothingness that expands to consume the entire Universe! In less than a second! Sounds like an enthusiastic ten-year old after watching a bad Sci-Fi flick.

  • Then the theories are incomplete (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    If the theories are calculating that it could happen, but it hasn't happened, the theories are obviously incomplete, wrong, or the calculations are wrong. Because the evidence in the form: the universe is still here; strongly indicates to the opposite.

  • In addition to the comments concerning the fact that there is nothing new at the LHC that wouldn't already be produced by cosmic rays in our atmosphere - there is an assumption in the paper: The production of small black holes at the LHC rests upon the assumption of "large" extra dimensions. There is no experimental evidence for this assumption. Therefore, there are many conclusions one could draw, a few that are consistent with the results of this paper are: There are no large extra dimensions. The para

  • What? (Score:2)

    by dcw3 ( 649211 )

    Are they saying black holes don't matter?

  • It's a little funny (in a cynical sense) to consider that if some other life form had advanced to this point and destroyed their planet, there would be no evidence left of them (minus whatever they had established in space and maybe whatever radio waves they had broadcast).

  • In a universe of nearly infinite size (from our perspective at least), there's bound to be other more advanced species somewhere. Many of them too. If it was possible to collapse the universe with tiny black holes, one of them would have already done it and we would not be here to talk about it.

    • But if we or another race out in the Universe did collapse the vacuum and destroy the Universe, wouldn't it only be one of the Many Worlds? We would continue to exist in the alternate Universe where the bubble did not form. It would turn out to be like the quantum experiments where they see probabilities of things, but in this case it would always be a probability of 100% not collapsing the vacuum since any World that did collapse would cease to exist and there would be no observers to measure that probabil

  • And you can teleport (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    And since particles can quantum tunnel that must mean that there is a small chance of all of the particles I'm made up of tunneling at the same time, thus enabling me to teleport wherever I want. Somehow I doubt I'll achieve this any time soon.

  • What is the one thing a black hole must have? Mass. What is the one thing a black hole created in a Collider will never have? Mass. Only a black hole created inside a Uranium or Plutonium particle MIGHT have enough mass to exist.

  • But but I thought women in STEM were banned by order of the patriarchy?

  • That many other civilisations in our universe have used higher energies, yet our universe is still here.

  • Trust the scientists, they are always as correct as their data. Let us forget Luminiferous aether, Young Earth theory, Static universe, Immovable continents, Stress theory of ulcers, ...

  • Iff black holes can briefly upset the Higgs energy balance and put it in a new state, there is at least a possibility that that same process can be used to harvest very large energies from the vacuum state. Of course, I don't know whether the new temporary Higgs state will be at higher or lower energies that the nromal state, but I assume they will be higher.

  • There are over 7 billion people on the planet and growing - each of whom will die and will likely not have a pleasant death. A black hole would be a pretty clean way to go.

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