Concern over Cern's attempt at blackhole creation, DANGER!

Group,

Pardon my ignorance , but I was wondering if any of you might be able to inform me as to any possible danger in the attempt to create nano-blackholes here on Earth.

I know that they are supposed to evaporate almost immediately via Hawking radiation, but what if this doesn't happen?

In the worst case scenario where the blackholes form together and fall into the center of the Earth where all that heavy uranium, lead and iron reside, what might be the result? How long would the Earth survive? Keep in mind that the the Earth's gravitational pressure could "force-feed" the blackholes.

Also, how do they intend to control them? It seems to me that a blackhole can't be susceptible to electromagnetic manipulation since any charge it has would be contained within the event horizon. Is this correct?

Lastly, if this works I presume they'll want to do it again, only bigger. Then again, only bigger. Then yet again, only bigger. When does someone start to draw lines here?

Wouldn't it be best to pursue these experiments off-world sometime in the future? Someplace far away?

I just finished watching the tape of "A Brief History of Time" wherein Stephen Hawking explains Hawking radiation. My opinion is that his conclusions are illogical.

As he stated the virtual pairs are broken apart by the event horizon, but it's a 50-50 chance whether the particle or anti-particle falls in. Therefore there can be no net change to the mass. Half of something minus half of something equals no change.

The radiation certainly should exist, but it should be the result of space itself radiating free particles and anti-particles, not a result of a loss of mass of the black hole itself.

Does this make sense?

Eric

Yea that makes alot of sense, like I know concrete equations can predict all they want but just that off chance kinda makes u think for a second.... then really curious

The event horizon for one of these little black holes is going to be so small that it wouldn't even be able to "eat" a proton, and maybe not even an electron. Black holes are not these strange, death causing beasts as some people think (although they they could be sometimes.)
Costs is where people draw the line. The new collider at CERN costs in the neighborhood of 8 Billion dollars. To go bigger is going to cost much much more than this, and cost will stop them from going to big.

Steveo,

Right, it will indeed be very small, at first. But it will grow exponentially as the pressures in the Earth's core ram countless quantum particles into it, then atoms, then molecules, then specs, then chunks... then the whole darn thing.

Eric

well what classifies a black hole as a black hole, does it have to emit hawking radiation, or does it need a certiain effect on sp/light on the cosmic scale or does it have to do what we "all" know they do and that is suck in stuff, so if it cant suck in a proton or election then does it still have a pull on them? and if it cant suck in a proton or election then how do we phsically know its there or measure it besides the math behind it.... please someone define :Black Hole:

A black hole is a region of spacetime from which nothing can escape, not even light. This region has so much mass concentrated in it that there is no way for a nearby object to escape its gravitational pull.

The idea of a mass concentration so dense that even light would be trapped goes all the way back to Laplace in the 18th century. Almost immediately after Einstein developed general relativity, Karl Schwarzschild discovered a mathematical solution to the equations of the theory that described such an object. It was only much later, with the work of such people as Oppenheimer, Volkoff, and Snyder in the 1930's, that people thought seriously about the possibility that such objects might actually exist in the Universe.

In general relativity, gravity is a manifestation of the curvature of spacetime. Massive objects distort space and time, so that the usual rules of geometry don't apply anymore. Near a black hole, this distortion of space is extremely severe and causes black holes to have some very strange properties. In particular, a black hole has something called an 'event horizon.' This is a spherical surface that marks the boundary of the black hole. You can pass in through the horizon, but you can't get back out. In fact, once you've crossed the horizon, you're doomed to move inexorably closer and closer to the 'singularity' at the center of the black hole.

Black holes are formed when we compress a material to such an extent that both electron degenercy and then neutron degenercy pressure cannot resist further collapse. At this point nothing else can stop further collapse to a singularity.

A black hole, in theory, can have any mass. Most are formed from the collapse of a stellar core that was about 10 times the size of our Sun. i.e. 10^31 kg. Galactic cores are thought to also contain massive black holes, several million to several billion times the mass of our Sun. But small tiny black holes are equally possible, although only theorised and not observed. These could have been produced early in the evolution of our universe.

According to Hawkings the amount of radiation from a black hole is inversely proportional to its size. Hence a small black hole will radiate faster than a large one. Whether Hawkings radiation is in reality true has yet to be proved.

The only way I know of detecting a black hole is by its effect on surrounding matter. Black holes cannot be viewed directly but if we can detect a massive concentration of matter, in a very small area, we can infer the existence of a black hole. Also if matter is present in the region of the black hole and is in the process of falling on to the event horizon it emits radiation which we might detect.

Not sure if this helps the discussion, but it summarises what I think is known about black holes to date.

Steveswin,

That is a good synopsis.

One must also consider that even if Hawking's math works (though I don't think so) he could still be wrong.

One only needs to consider the lagrangian math upon which Emmy Noether used to prove conservation in symmetrical systems. We already have proof that this is not always true in the CP violation which has been verified and measured in colliders.

So if math isn't always trustworthy to begin with, and people are prone to error, should we risk our world and all it represents in one science experiment?

Eric

ubavontuba,

I fully agree.

There are acceptable levels of risk we can and should take and unacceptable ones. This definitely transgresses into an area where we do not yet have the skills or the knowledge to play with such a powerful process.


steve

Steveswin and other agreeable parties,

Then join me. E-mail everyone and post messages in every corner explaining the danger. Feel free to use my original post.

Let's start a chain-reaction of our own.

Eric

Group,

I just wanted to follow-up on whether anyone else was interested in helping me get the word out on this danger.

You may e-mail me privately with a response if you like, just click on "ubavontubna" to the left and navigate to the upper right box. You can send me a private e-mail message by clicking it in the list.

Eric

actually they think they already made some.. just dont have definate proof..
some theorise these will only be short lived but yeah I would still feel safer if it was another planet or better yet me instead.

Cow,

Yes, I know. Frankly, this frightens me. I'm hoping that it was only nuetron matter or a weird sort of BEC.

Eric

I can just picture aliens studying us like we study animals. Inside our homes are small cameras that we are not intelligent enough to detect, like many animals in burrows that have cameras in them. So the aliens watch and study us, learning what little we have to offer. As some alien scientists watch earth from a window in their space ship, taking notes, they notice something. The earth is gone! They go back to their high-speed cameras and replay what their eyes could not detect. Earth is sucked into itself and becomes a blackhole! The aliens laugh as "Another One Bites the Dust" plays softly in the background.

Of course I am sure alot of equations have different opinions, but this is mine. Why study what we believe is the most powerful, dangerous, most mysterious and downright mindboggling thing known to exist? Why here on earth? Sure, lets make a small nuclear explosion and watch it with a microscope? "OW, MY EYE!"

My thought is this....Why don't we finish mapping the ocean floor, exploring the caves here on earth, maybe even land a person or 2 on mars before we go playing with dynamite. Cause in reality, a black hole as we know it is SUPER ULTRA MEGA dangerous. "Only if your close to it"....Well DUH! If we make one well be close to it. I know that the stuff we learn will be valuble to science and mankind...but I can just picture those aliens...


"Lol, like handing dynamite to a baby and pointing at the BIG, RED, Detonate button."

O well, just my thoughts.

all-

Does anyone know offhand what Hawking's radiation rate is? Preferably the actual derivatives. The reason is that if the correlation is inverse, we could easily figure out how quickly the synthetic BH will dissipate. I seriously doubt we have to worry, depending on the slope of the curve, given that the size of this thing will be in the 10^-18 range.

-gleefully spinning solids

Hey Everyone

I did a little bit of research today to see if your fears of creating a black hole here on earth is anything nearly as bad as you all feel it is. I crunched a few numbers for an experiment that wouldn't be done, and there is still nothing to worry about. At CERN the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), according to their website when they are opporational can accelerate protons to 14TeV, and they can also collide lead with collision energy of 1150TeV (according to their website) so I used the lead collision number for all of my calculations (the colliders doing this research would have much less energy, more on the order of 1Tev, or less). I discovered that the Swartzchild radius of this black hole would be 3.035*10^-48m. This is approximately 13 orders of magnitude smaller than the planck length (planck length = 1.6*10^-35m) And apparently the planck length is the smallest something can get......weird (I only used the most simplistic equations for this......I did a search for black hole radius and used the simple equation that you learn in highschool for a black hole radius, so it might not be entirely accurate, but you get the idea right?) Also, the classic electron radius is 2.8*10^-15m, so an electron would be to big to fit inside of the event horizon. Also, the mass of this black hole (assuming that all of the collisions energy went into the formation of the black hole would be about 2*10^-21kg. I used Newton's universal law of gravitation and a simple kinematics formula and integrated over a distance. If a particle was 1nm away from the this black hole it would take 80 seconds to fall into it based only on the gravity of the black hole (it would have to be at rest and without earths gravity) In a real collider everything is under a vacuum so it is very unlikely that a particle would ever get that close to the black hole, and if it did it would always be moving close to the speed of light.

There would be a better probability of hitting a single, stationary atom with the sun for a distance similar to that between the sun and pluto. It is a physical improbability, if not impossibility for a created black hole in a collider to ever gain any mass, let alone enough to swallow the earth. There should be no unneeded fear here. As black holes are theorized, they are not this mystical physical object. They still follow the same laws as everything else does, plus one extra one (once you have crossed the event horizon you can't come back out).