There is absolutely, positively, definitely no chance of the LHC destroying the planet when it eventually switches on some time later this year. Right?
Err, yep. And yet a few niggling doubts are persuading some scientists to run through their figures again. And the new calculations are throwing up some surprises.
One potential method of destruction is that the LHC will create tiny black holes that could swallow everything in their path including the planet. In 2002, Roberto Casadio at the Universita di Bologna in Italy and a few pals reassured the world that this was not possible because the black holes would decay before they got the chance to do any damage.
Now they’re not so sure. The question is not simply how quickly a mini-black hole decays but whether this decay always outpaces any growth.
Casadio have reworked the figures and now say that: ” the growth of black holes to catastrophic size does not seem possible.”
Does not seem possible? That’s not the unequivocal reassurance that particle physicists have been giving us up till now.
What’s more, the new calculations throw up a tricky new prediction. In the past, it had always been assumed that black holes would decay in the blink of an eye.
Not any more. Casadio and co say: “the expected decay times are much longer (and possibly ≫ 1 sec) than is typically predicted by other models”
Whoa, let’s have that again: these mini black holes will be hanging around for seconds, possibly minutes?
That doesn’t sound good. Anybody at CERN care to clarify?
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0901.2948: On the Possibility of Catastrophic Black Hole Growth in the Warped Brane-World Scenario at the LHC
Comments
237 responses to “Black holes from the LHC could survive for minutes”
That’s what I asked and CERN never replied. My question was: “Is it possible that some of these black might coalesce and form larger black holes? larger black holes would be more powerful than their predecessors and possibly aquire more mass and grow still larger.”
However cosmic rays have more energy and there hasn’t been any incidents with them has there?
“Nonsense. to the particles colliding it makes not a dang bit of difference whether one is sitting still or they are moving towards each other. basic physics 001.”
Better take a refresher… it’s all about
conservation of momentum which is why there
are counter rotating rings.
Also…
“Its said that cosmic rays have more energy, but protons have a LOT more mass”
Cosmic rays, the really powerful and
damaging ones (though much more rare) are
relativistic Fe56 … 56X the mass of protons.
(core of stars, thrown off after super nova)
However they are not involved with head
on collisions with each other… they
typically follow the earth magnetic field
lines which is why they are more abundant
over the poles (higher dose of radiation
when you have a high inclination polar
flight)
There is no difference between a cosmic ray colliding with a particle in the atmosphere, and the collision of two particles in a collider – except that in the collider, many particles collide in a small volume of space in a short time. There is a lot more assymetry in multiple concurrent or near concurrent collisions in a small spatial volume than there are in a 2 particle collision scenario like that involving cosmic rays.
Anyway, physicists will ramp up the energy in the collider gradually.
If black holes are formed, which itself is speculative, prior to black hole production there should be some warning in the form of an unexpectedly rapid increase in the energy density released from the collision. That should provide sufficient warning of impending black hole formation to alert physicists to a problem.
Okay.
With atom bomb in 1945, they only worried that the atmosphere might catch fire. Look at how much we’ve progressed!
The Warped Brane-World is nonsense. See proof that a universe is possible only with dimension 3+1 (which actually agrees with reality!) in book
Our Almost Impossible Universe:
Why the laws of nature make the existence of humans extraordinarily unlikely
thankfully, none of you sound like legitimate scientists. let’s leave it to the experts please and avoid this senseless speculation.
[…] Black holes from the LHC could survive for minutes. There is absolutely, positively, definitely no chance of the LHC destroying the planet when it eventually switches on some time later this year. Right? […]
I think that we should let scientists at LHC, whose whole livelihood depends on continuing this project, make all analyses and determinations as to whether we go ahead with the project.
This is the first reassuring thing in regard to this I’ve heard yet.
It only takes one…
kids on the block, a black hole that has eaten the moon will produce exa ct background radiation at 2.7k totally indistinguisahble from the radiation of the so-called big bang, thus it is self evident that being the moon the most common planetoid, and the background radiation the most common radiation and the black hole moon MACHO the only one that can produce it, many moons bombarded by cosmic rays are becoming black holes. Further on, cosmic rays have nothing to do with what CERN will do, deconfine large hadrons, extracting its quarks and massing them together through stockastic cooling in big lumps. According to chen from the institute of physics of china, 10,000 deconfined quarks will form ice-9, the seed of a quark star. CERN will produce one million a second. CHances are thus very big that we become a black hole or a quark star. So who is going to stop this madness? They have inmunity in court. We lost our suit against them for lack of jurisdiction. We need political help if not military. if not as they say in spanglish, good luck y buena muerte
The black hole will eat the CERN scientist first……OMG. Being in love with the monster is not all that brilliant…and scientific!.
If events at the LHC swallow Switzerland, what are we going to do without wrist watches and chocolate?
Actually I think it would be amazing that black holes could exist for some appreciable length, because then we could study them in a controlled environment, and how could would that be?
As for whether it is hazardous, I don’t think that it could be as bad as testing nuclear bombs out in the open and letting the wind carry away the waste.
might you explain what a quark star is, in all my astronomy and cosmology courses I’ve never heard about one, though I have wondered if there might be a degeneracy level below neutron, but the difference between something like that and a point source black hole has no difference.
So my questions are, what are you saying? and where did you come up with this nonsense?
I havn’t bothered to read many replies, but would just like to say… When are these “scientists” going to accept that we exist in an electric universe ?
Black holes have never been proven to exist and they cannot be created quite simply because black holes DON’T EXIST !
>”This is based on research still to be published.”
Research done on the inside of your own closed eyelids during an acid trip doesn’t count, dude.
We still dont know how many Dimensions really exist. Bumbleebees can fly although they shouldn’t be able to acording to current physical laws.
Experiments always hold a certain danger to the scientist, the environment or maybe not today but someday tomorrow in an even larger scale.
Information is key to surviving experiments and make them a grand success.
The fewer information we have what could happen the more dangerous it could get.
Pick this moral here:
A highly thought of scientist, thought of as reliable, once hypothesized the human body would explode if it travelled at 30mph (or some speed).
This scientist, a cultist scientific expert authority figure, was also backed by the then current conditioned cultist thinking of that particular time.
His followers, then went on to condition his nervous system that he was right, his authority and belief conditioned his followers to perceive he was right and they were right, there authority stamped.
Society believed everything these cult of experts said. They temporarily stopped breeding carriage horses for speed.
Eventually the hypothesis was tested and this scientist was proven wrong, but fortunately the worlds existence was not at stake.
And because the world went on, he got his book deal and drove a fast car with a leggy blonde on his arm.
Moral: Perceptions look like they are speaking the truth but they may not be. It is only in time we can see if they were right. We will not see if they are right if we don’t exist.
Ignore the precautionary principle. It’s an evolutionary dead end and an excuse for doing nothing.
er, I am NOT an expert on this, just as I assume none of you are but I fail to see how particles traveling at, almost, the speed of light (not the speed of, not faster than) collide and somehow form a singularity/black hole. Even if we could force two particles into the same space at the same time, which I don’t believe the lhc would do, what about mass/gravity. Two particles does not a black hole make, nor three, nor a billion. I believe that in order for a black hole to form, it requires > 5 solar masses. Now obviously acceleration is playing part of gravity in the lhc but I still don’ buy there being anywhere NEAR enough mass contributed to the collisions to form a black hole. That’s just my opinion though.
Also, Larry-Right you are!
-KevinC
Don’t worry … it’s all relative….
/*…we should let scientists at LHC … make all analysis and determinations as to whether we go ahead with the project…*/
The questions is, whether these scientists are competent at all, if they haven’t made such analysis a WELL BEFORE the LHC project ever started.
For example, did they considered a formation of neutron fluid? Where we can see such analysis? Nowhere? Sorry – we have to stop the project immediately, until analysis will not be published and reviewed. This is a normal approach, by the way…
It’s somewhat silly, we aren’t building a single bridge without security analysis and the seven billion project like LHC has no official security analysis done at all. Who is responsible for this? Why he isn’t arrested already?
A layman writes: A mini BH should exert great pressure below itself so as to free-fall to center of Earth. Simple contemplation of electricity theoretically centers an electron-free core of unknown size into just about the same place. Thus, infrequent BH reinforcement would have BH so full of positrons as to repell any more + stuff from contact until reinforced by new BHs.
That rescue from BH expires if frequent BH generation gobbles positive core faster than it can replenish. So, the so far so good platitude is no good.
MillerAD1
omg we are all gonna die
Dear arxivblog.com,
first, a sociological comment. You seem to misunderstand that the authors of this preprint are on the “LHC alarmist” side and they have been generating the “worst case” scenarios that have been used by some completely wrong papers about the LHC alarm, too.
(One paper by Plaga for example combined scaling laws for a 4D black hole with those of a 5D black hole to derive numbers wrong by 23 orders of magnitude – that’s typical what the alarmist people have to do.)
So if even these people argue that there’s no threat, it should be a reason for you to sleep well, not the other way around.
The idea that the growth of these black holes in any scenario is going to exceed the evaporation is ludicrous. The maximum radius R of black holes that can be produced by the LHC is close to the scale where we know that quantum gravity is not yet relevant, so R is not above 10^{-17} meters. This holds regardless of the number of dimensions.
Also, if we assume (incorrectly, to prove a paradox) that such a black hole can grow to a “dangerous” size, the ordinary 4D scalings for the black hole have to become important right before reaching this (partly conventional) critical dangerous size (or earlier), so I can use them.
The 4D scalings say that the temperature, in c=hbar=1 units, goes like 1/R and the energy loss by Hawking radiation goes like area.T^4 (the black body laws) which goes like 1/R^2 (lost energy per second), in its rest frame. For R=10^{-17}, this is really the lower bound on the radiation.
On the other hand, the eating energy rate goes like the cross section times the speed of the black hole times the average density of matter/energy where the black hole flies. In c=hbar=1 units, the cross section goes like R^2. However, the average density of matter it goes through (on long enough distance through Earth) is something like 10,000 kg/m^3 at most.
This looks like a high number but it is about 10^{31} protons per 10^{45} proton radia cubed which is 10^{-14} QCD nuclear densities or so, or 10^{-23} “electroweak densities” (1/R^4), plus minus a few orders of magnitude. So the cross section times this density is about 10^{-23} times the Hawking radiation rate, and it is an upper bound, really.
So even if you add the Lorentz factor for the fast black holes (which slows down the radiation but not the eating) – surely less than 10^{4} because they’re produced much more at rest than the protons in the beam – you will still see that the accretion is roughly by 20 orders of magnitude slower than the Hawking radiation.
Seconds of life are completely absurd. Such a black hole, because it would be close to the fundamental gravity scale (in a model with extra dimensions) would have a decay time close to the same scale and surely couldn’t fly for macroscopic distances (or live for seconds). All papers that try to invent catastrophes by writing pages of stuff, instead of a proper analysis fully included in this comment, fail to be serious ones.
Even if you thought that I am wrong on this, a few second living black hole wouldn’t imply a serious problem by itself, either. At any rate, a mini black hole at the LHC would decay before it would meet the first nucleus, and it if happened that it meets the first, it would surely decay before the second nucleus, and so on, making the probability that it eats many nuclei zero for all practical purposes.
Best wishes
Lubos
People dont create black holes — Black holes create black holes. Someone mis-used government funds on this one.
I’m pleased I didn’t waste my life believing the fraud that is Newtonian thermodynamics… Imagine trying to change your belief system after absorbing that crock of doggy dirt in an academic institution !
On the subject of armageddon hysteria based on really weak science:
Does anyone know the carbon footprint of the LHC?
[…] BLACK HOLES FROM THE LARGE HADRON COLLIDER last longer than expected? (Via […]
Given the choice couldn’t we just opt for Skynet?
Somebody above mentioned that high-energy physics should be done on the ‘dark side of the moon’. There is no side perpetually dark, though. It rotates.
I think you mean ‘the side of the moon opposite to earth’
“The smart way to do high energy physics research is on the moon, preferably the dark side”
Uh no. Without our moon, the climate would become so severe, unstable and chaotic that nothing would survive.
[…] might have the headline wrong, but the creation of a black hole would definitely end drunk driving, n’est […]
Read “Thrice Upon a Time” (James P. Hogan – 1980). This is an interesting Science Fiction work based on the effects of miniature black holes created by a fusion reactor. Fun reading with enough time-travel causality paradoxes to make your head spin
If we get sucked into a black hole I want to go into the one where my 401(k) went.
I think this is bad. American officials should do something about this because if scientists do end up destroying the earth with a black hole it won’t matter that they were in Europe, America will get the blame. On the other hand, if we act now to be seen dealing as a responsible member of the international community, then, if the worst happens, we have a good chance of pinning it on the Jews.
Black holes would be an excellent place to dispose of nuclear waste.
The LHC is located in Europe, where scientists have mostly accepted the non-science of global warming. I hope the scientists working on the LHC are not the same ones working on global warming. It’s one thing to posit an ill-conceived theory blaming mankind for inventing fire, but quite another to create a machine that might put out all our fires.
BTW, I’m fascinated by Kumnick’s posts, even if I can’t understand them.
As a physicist working in this area I can assure you that the chance of something catastrophic occurring because of the LHC is less that one in ten. These are still good odds when weighed against the potential advancement of scientific knowledge.
Upside: No more worry about the Impending Recession Of Doom And The Vast Expansion of Government Power That’s Necessary To Avoid It.
Downside: My refi just went through. Why did I ever bother.
Something I’ll Wish I’d Seen: European Boffin going “Uh Oh!”
Wait a minute! Europe starts making black holes in their collider thingy, while trillions of dollars have recently gone missing. Subprime mortgages? I think not…
Barry, your ideas are intriguing and I would like to read your pamphlet.
If this was a climatology study, the scientists would either adjust their model so the problem goes away or adjust the data to make the model produce the result they desire. Why have physicists not been educated on how science is done in the 21st century?
Hmmmm.
“Did anyone see that movie ‘event horizon’? The black hole took the guy into a dimension of pure evil. That kind of thing happens in real life. I am scared!”
Stop whining! The US Congress isn’t -that- bad.
Though it is a working black hole where my taxes are concerned!
Any guesses when it’ll evaporate? Please?
The more disturbing fact about all this is the billions and billions being spent to satisfy the curiosity of a select group of scientists and philosophers. Whatever the results will yield little real-world benefit outside some incestuous lecture circuit.
no shortage of opinions on this subject.
“Somebody above mentioned that high-energy physics should be done on the ‘dark side of the moon’.”
As a matter of fact its *all* dark.
Stop the LHC!
Because an Earth that has been sucked into a black hole CANNOT be PAVED!