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”
“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.”
I imagine that 50 years ago, someone said the same thing about integrated circuits or lasers.
“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!”
IT WAS A DIMENSION OF TOTAL CHAOS!!
“IT WAS A DIMENSION OF TOTAL CHAOS!!”
I have always wanted to meet that Slaanesh. Khorne though, I’m not thrilled about.
now I understand how the black holes in this Universe are created…. by stupid civilisations that turn them self into BH when they become “smart”. Don’t keep looking for other civilisations because or they are too tiny to say “hi!”, or they were to “smart”….and trash them self. Just keep looking for the BH’s in the universe and You’ll know who was too “smart” and stay away of that button! Don’t push the button!
Remember all the hoopla over Y2K? This black hole discussion is along the same lines. As you remember, nothing happened and I predict that nothing will happen when the LHC fires up in a few months. We may gain some insights into the makeup of the universe, its beginning and ultimate fate. Answers to big questions require big investments and lots of risk. Yes, there are unintneded consequences, just like those created when Columbus sailed off to discover a new route to India. We got positives and negatives that could NEVER have been conceived of before the voyage. IF…and its a hugely unlikely IF…the LHC does destroy the earth, who is going to be around to say “I told you so.”
Isn’t it obvious Bush is responsible…
We already have a black hole to deal with on this side of the Atlantic.
There were warnings about that, and like the LHC, nobody listened.
In reply to JDW, it is not philosophers that are the cause of this waste of taxpayers money, because any competent philospher does not require external empirical data in order to derive at an accurate assessment. That is the realm of the braindead (the scientists), those that are unable to rationalise their way to truth.
“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.”
“There is no dark side of the moon; it’s all dark.”
Pink Floyd
“If events at the LHC swallow Switzerland, what are we going to do without wrist watches and chocolate?”
Don’t worry, we’ll still have Russian watches. they’re much better, faster even.
Hey there,
I’d come over and slap you, but my penile implant is stuck to this superconducting magnet.
Oh the humanity, you bastard!
Imbusch
—
Scientists get so wrapped up in whether they CAN do something that they often don’t waste much time thinking about whether they SHOULD. Something that has even a miniscule potential to destroy the planet shouldn’t be done so eagerly. Let’s hope they revisit their calculations many more times, and then do it all again. There is too much at stake, and the Law of Unintended Consequences may be pretty ugly with this one.
At least set up the LHC in Washington DC so if it explodes or eats just some of the Earth, it gets rid of Congress. That way, it really does provide a valuable service to mankind.
If cars didn’t exist (Go with me on this one) and the internal combustion engine had never been thought of and suddenly someone came up to you today and said “I have a great idea of how to get about without horses, it involves complex machinery compressing explosive fluid and igniting it, but you also need oil at temperatures and pressures that could that could also explode. But you will be able to move at 50 miles an hour as long as you don’t hit anything solid.” You’d probably think they were nuts finding a new way to try to kill yourself.
Fear of the unknown is the only problem here.
jonathan, when you say black holes suck beings into a world of pure evil, are you speculating that good beings would be sucked into our world, only to be tortured and driven mad?
I have had the occasion to be accelerated in the NASA Test pilot program and witness the mechanical and mathematical distortions that had been “Crayed”- as a graduate of flight-time in the NASA program i welcome any discussion of potential advancement. The BH criterion is unrelated to the dimensonal specifics- It is inferred that the BH time-line would be a necessity- therefore, we can only wait for the Extant reply
This sounds like the predictions that nuclear fission, then fusion would cause a chain reaction in the atmosphere and the earth would be consumed in a giant fireball. Those predictions came from “scientists/physicists” too, and we’re still here. The planet has a finite life. Better to get sucked instantly into a black hole than suffer the consequences of a large meteor strike, or a nuclear war. Life is terminal – noboby gets out alive, so why worry?
Don’t worry everyone. My wifes ass will clog any hole. If not, it will whither away due to the constant bitching.
To Mr. Kumnick, I have a few questions I would like to ask;
First, I am fairly unfamiliar with physics in general. But your statement that Black Holes are the reaction to a supposed violation of the ‘conservation of nonexistence’ confuses me. If you try to destroy something that does not exist, wouldn’t the force and energy applied in that destruction simply continue on to an existent force? Please clarify.
Second, if the mass and energy are destroyed upon meeting the singularity, what happens to the result? Does it become nonexistant, or does it turn into something else, as the Law of Conservation of Energy states? What about the continual energy released around a black hole? Where does that energy come from, if the objects that strike the singularity become nonexistent? Please clarify.
Third, and back onto topic, if a black hole WERE to be created in the LHC, wouldn’t the resulting nonexistence begin to draw in objects, instead of collapsing upon itself and becoming inert like the standard theorem? And if that is true, then why are cosmic rays not creating these pockets of nonexistence and tearing the universe apart?
Fourth, you state that the Conservation of nonexistence is the reason for Dark Matter and the Dirac Sea theorem [A model of the vacumn filled with negative energy particles.]? But if something is nonexitent, how can it create matter that is applied under the Law of Conservation of Energy?
I await your response, sir.
lets just try it, just once ok, c’mon pleeeeeease can we, can we boss!!?
i hope it destroys us all!
Isaiah 13:10; Isaiah 34:4; Joel 2:10; Matthew 24:29 and Revelation 6:12-17.
It’s not a matter of if it will happen, but when it will happen.
“Immediately after the anguish of those days,
the sun will be darkened,
the moon will give no light,
the stars will fall from the sky,
and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.
And then at last, the sign that the Son of Man is coming will appear in the heavens, and there will be deep mourning among all the peoples of the earth. And they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And he will send out his angels with the mighty blast of a trumpet, and they will gather his chosen ones from all over the world —from the farthest ends of the earth and heaven.
For God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. God sent his Son into the world not to judge the world, but to save the world through him. John 3:16-17
Do you know the Son? Yeshua Ha Mashiach, Jesus The Christ?
This illustrates the problems stunting innovation in all of the sciences. I remember the outcry from the “LHC promoters” about the crackpot theory of the person who filed the lawsuit to stop the startup of the LHC based on this very issue. The “LHC” community thrashed this guy. Now it turns out he may not have been completely crazy. How does this revelation impact the “LHC” community? Well, it doesn’t. Now they show their arrogance again by thrashing those concerned by their mistakes. Look, its pretty simple. When you make calculations that turn out to be wildly wrong then admit your mistake. Apologize to those who had it right in questioning you. Get your act together. Then try to convince those who misplaced their faith in you that you are not missing the mark this time. And for the love of Pete, kill the arrogance. When you screw up, it is not the time to convince folks your a genius. In the mean time, buy stock in Alcoa, tin foil hats are “in” again. Thanks to bumbling arrogance from alleged smart people.
Umm, someone posted on here that there is a 1 in 10 chance something catastrophic can happen? Would you stake the existence of the planet on 1 in 10?
My understanding is that the earth itself would become a black hole if it were compressed to a diameter of about 4 inches. If this is true, how does slamming an individual particle into another, even at close to the speed of light, produce a mass concentration even close to that of compressing the earth into such a small space? I understand that part the kinetic energy is converted to mass, but even at the speed of light, I would think it would fall way short of the required density
as long as we have jeff goldblum to figure out how to control the situation if it gets out of control and will smith to kick the but of anything that gets in his way we’ll all be fine. I’m mean come on what could possibly go wrong here? these are smart people they wouldn’t do anything stupid….right?….
Quite possibly. Since the black holes created will be quite small, they may not be able to tell the difference between a 401(k) and another mini-black hole.
Let’s do the math.
P.END =Probability of World Destruction
U.END =Utility of the World Destruction
U.KNOWLEDGE = Utility of Knowledge Gained
Utility being how much we, humanity, value something.
Thus is
P.END x U.END < (1-P.END) x U.KNOWLEDGE
If Probability of End of the world is speculatively POSITIVE, then I doubt the Utlity of the knowledge gain is worth the risk. I have been around too many arogant smart folks who’s sure they are right, to know that we just don’t know.
One good thing to come out of the testing upto now is the economic growth in the employment market.
I wonder how many cleaners have been employed to remove the soot from the proton tubes after the explosion caused by faulty electrical wiring, leading to approximately six tonnes of liquid helium on the loose, just like a mad moose !?
Why In God’s Name didn’t the world stop these
INSANE Scientists way back when the world had the chance…..
“JUST BECAUSE YOU CAN….. DOESN’T MEAN YOU SHOULD”……..
Does any one know the term “Bend Over And Kiss your A– GOODBYE?”
This is as insane as it will ever get.
Let me get this straight, stem cell research is a bad thing even though it could produce some cures, but this Hadron Collider machine is OK! Does anyone else see something morally wrong with this picture. How is it that they got all this money to create this thing, but could not use it to do something like cure a disease or help the auto industry come up with a way to create a new fuel source, or design something that can have a huge positive impact on life here on earth? I am not a scientist by no means but I do understand colliding two atoms is not a good thing.
I got tired of reading the comments. Do Not Feed the Crackpots, folks! It only encourages them, even though you may think you’re doing them a kindness.
If we make black holes (and I hope we do, and that we can detect their decays), they pose an infinitesimal threat. I use infinitesimal in the following sense:
If the threat of being killed by a single solar neutrino is considered significant (which it isn’t — you’re bombarded by 6E10/cm^2/s of them), the chances of any black hole created by the LHC taking in matter and growing would still be infinitesimal by comparison. Let’s do the math.
The energy available to create a black hole at the LHC totals 14 TeV per interaction, plus the mass of the protons (negligible, for our purposes — less than a tenth of a percent of the total energy).
That means that a black hole with a mass of 2.5E-20 grams could be created. What kind of Schwartzchild radius would it have?
About 4E-50 m. Compared to a proton (2E-15 m) and an electron’s classical “radius” (1.5E-15 m) — that’s a hundred million billion billion billion times smaller than an electron.
Worse, its gravitational pull would be indescribably feeble. It couldn’t “suck” anything in without running straight into it.
Since the space inside and between atoms is vast nothingness for the most part, I’d be surprised if the black hole at that size, with nothing to guide it, encountered ANYTHING that it could eat EVER, much less within a second, much less enough somethings to counter its evaporation. Remember, anything like a point particle that it DOES manage to consume provides it with something between 1/10,000th and 1/1,000,000th of its initial mass/energy budget. It has to eat FAST, but it can’t.
The only real problem with the 1 sec. problem for me is that it makes detection of decay products impossible, since it’s probably left the detector far behind, and because we are used to things happening in 10E-24 seconds.
OK. So — don’t worry.
And no, antimatter/ion gun would just feed it. The Hawking radiation mechanism is something different.
I’ll comment on the hysteria I see in this forum in a different post.
Now, about the hysteria…
GET A GRIP!
First, the author needs to do the math before making (frankly) stupid comments to get some pageviews.
Second — getting yourselves all in a lather about the evil, stupid scientists who are going to destroy the world is also really dumb. If you don’t even have a glimmer of understanding of the topic, why are you so ready to assume that the worst is happening, and that the end of the world is at hand…
This kind of stupid hysteria makes the characters on Saturday morning cartoons look like paragons of balance and calm. If you want to understand something, go understand it. Don’t just spout.
That is all.
Hey, does this mean that someone might be wrong about man made global warming? Or are black holes the solution?
Prufrock,
Take a look at this article from New Scientist which basically says that the re-assurances we’ve been getting from CERN are not worth the paper they’re written on. How do you respond to that?
I believe we need to know why everything is the way it is. But, why must we feel our generation must provide every answer to every question? Why shouldn’t we conduct this possibly catastrophic research in space? We have placed the burden and danger of providing a comparatively quick answer to all questions and problems onto ourselves. Common sense is the most powerful asset in the universe. It is shared by geniuses and laymen alike. It can easily be subdued, and often is, in moments of passion or excitement. Common sense tells me wait, more testing is needed. We may not be capable of reversing what we create. Answers from this testing will be the same from now to eternity.
Just think of all the scientific data that might be created in attempting to stop or destroy a black hole.
The best laugh I had all year was when I read the comments on the CERN website about the damage that occurred to the LHC when powered up last September. One critic suggested it wasn’t all that bad, “Just buff it out.”
I’m wiling to bet anyone one million dollars that the LHC experiment doesn’t produce a mini-black hole that destroys the earth.
We have no idea if there are little black holes all around us or not. They have never been detected. Until we know for sure, and we have studied them more, learned how they behave and how they decay, we should not be taking these chances. It doesn’t help that these guys have already proved there is a problem with their own calculations. What if there are more errors in the math that are unknown when this collider is started again. It could grow quickly according to the amount of matter that may fuel its growth, making it grow out of control. I am not will to take that chance and what gives them the right to take that chance for us.
Stephen King already knew all this, as demonstrated by his book-movie: “The Langoliers.”
Don’t lay down on the job and don’t create black holes!
my very private experience is, if Lumo predicts something, then probability of exactly the opposite increases in at least ten percent.
Tim Roberts – that’s LIE down on the job. Aargh, the death of English every day. Maybe we deserve to be evaporated…
Well, anyway, we now have a new theory about how the Asteroid Belt was created in the orbit where you would expect to see a planet…where maybe there WAS once a planet.
Unfortunatelly, we do not replicate a natural phenomenon, because nowhere in nature such collider exists by my knowledge.
If some cosmic ray targets Earth, it does so in individial particles, in thick layer of thin stratosphere and with a nonzero resulting momentum toward Earth.
Can the disaster probability increasing be calculated under consideration of these differences? If yes, why it wasn’t estimated before LHC project was started?
“Fear of the unknown is the only problem here.”
Nope. Fear of having my ass sucked out through my belly button is the problem here.
HELLLLLLLLOOOOOOO. YOU BUNCH OF THEORETICAL WACKOS THAT STARTED THIS ARE GOING TO HAVE US ALL KILLED ALL IN THE NAME OF SOLVING A THEORY! YOU ARE HOLDING THE EARTH HOSTAGE AND I ASK AND OR DEMAND AS A HUMAN CITIZEN LIVING IN THIS WORLD THAT YOU CEASE AND DESIST NOW! WHAT MAKES YOU THINK YOU CAN DO THIS IS AN ULTIMATE CRIME AGAINST ALL HUMANITY. STOP NOW AND THINK OF THE CONSEQUENCES WHEN YOU ARE WRONG ABOUT THE SAFETY OF THIS STUPID GAME YOU ARE PLAYING! STOP NOW!
In this paper, I do not see any assumptions on the cumulative effect of generating a substantial number of microscopic black holes and the potential for them to coalese into larger black holes. The paper seems to only consider to unique incidence of individual microscopic black holes. This seems a particularly narrow view in light of the potential catastrophic effects of creating larger black holes within the earth.
[…] can find out a little more about the Super Collider Black Holes here. Link to […]
When they exploded the first atomic bomb the scientists didn’t know if it could possibly ignite the atmosphere itself and destroy the entire planet. Guess what? They exploded it anyway. Oh well, so much for the Precautionary Principle.
Black holes, schmack holes…what happened to the evil Higgs Boson from the last particle creation furor a year or so ago? Hmmm? You people have all been played like violins by the Cern P.R. team: get the populace freaked about Black Holes so they’ll forget the REAL danger to the planet…Higgs Bosons!!!!
From Wikipedia:
In the science fantasy series Lexx, one character points out that although all-out nuclear war sometimes destroys all life on planets as advanced as Earth, it is much more common for such planets to be obliterated by physicists attempting to determine the precise mass of the Higgs boson particle. The particle colliders used to perform the calculations reach critical mass at the moment the mass of the particle is known, causing an explosion which destroys the planet and then collapses it into a nugget of super-dense matter “roughly the size of a pea.”
Guys, fox news is wondering how often the LHC might create individual black holes, since longer-lived ones have a greater chance of merging with each other, and, um, well, see ya.
What say you o ye great minds of physics to this startlingly insightful common sense observation?
Your penchant for reckless abandon is captivating.
No one seems to relate to one important fact (which is mentioned in the original article): that those micro- black holes would be created while moving near the speed of light. They’ll be half way to the Moon before they’ll be able to do much damage. And BTW, the first damage they inflict on the way out would be on the LHC itself – lost vacuum, immediate end of experiment.