CERN's Black Hole that can eat the earth

[Severian]

Therefore, the opinions I see fall into these categories:

Black holes will not be formed and therefore, whether Hawking radiation works or not is irrelevant.

Black holes will be formed, but Hawking radiation will intervene to stop it from growing.

Black holes will be formed, and Hawking radiation will fail to operate, or operate sufficiently to stop it from growing.

 

1 is the belief of most scientists. A few think 2 will happen. But only non-experts or crackpots think number 3 will happen.

 

You could worry about other things too if you like. Maybe switching on the LHC will cause the orbit of the moon to become unstable and crash into the Earth. Have you ever worried about that? No - because no-one has suggested it. Well no-one credible has suggested the appearance of non-evapourating black holes either.

[swansont]

swansont,

 

What are you worried about? If it's negligible, why take the doomsayers so seriously? (Or "nutters", I've since learned they're described here.)

 

Who said I was worried? What I take seriously is the effect of the doom-mongering, and crappy information going unchallenged.

 

Severian hit the nail on the head earlier. The same science and scientists predicted the black holes to begin with. You can't pick and choose — science isn't on the a la carte menu.

 

 

People like certainty. They generally loathe uncertainty. They make choices and evaluate things based on probabilities, but they'd prefer certainties. The market is a great example of this. So when people ask: "But it's not zero?" they may instead be merely trying to evaluate what the risk really amounts to with respect to their lives. So? Would you prefer to tell them "zero" even if you knew it wasn't zero, just to calm any undue fears?

 

No, I wouldn't.

 

It's as if you believe you're smart enough to handle the truth, but everybody else is not. Ever hear of "informed consent?" It's a concept in ethics. I'd suggest you rethink the attitude, because nothing will put an end to these experiments faster than the general public coming to believe "big science" isn't being perfectly forthcoming.

 

And here you reverse your argument. You're the one who suggested that saying zero was the better alternative, since "people like certainty." What if something unlikely happens in a science experiment, and it was shown that the scientists had misrepresented a small risk to be zero risk? That is the loss of credibility that will put an end to experiments.

[markamerica]

Swansont,

 

How does the statement "people like certainty" imply that I advocate lying to them?

 

If it doesn't(and it doesn't,) then your statement that I have reversed my argument is false.

 

Nice try.

 

Mark

[bombus]

What is the exact date and time (in GMT or BST) that the LHC is to be run for the first time?

[vortex]

It's always easier to believe a conspiracy than the science...

 

I agree. I would like to see someone prove that this catastrophe is likely to occur rather than simply refute why CERN says it will not.

 

On a side note, in a similar post I read that risk analysis is the chance of an event occurring multiplied by the magnitude of the results. Since the risk is virtually zero and the consequences are very large, maybe we should use L'Hopital's Rule.

[Greg]

I noticed many here state that if two photons traveling at almost light speed collide, any micro black hole it creates would be moving so fast it would just fly through earth. How is that possible?

 

I saw two cars traveling at the same speed collide head on, and the only thing that was still moving was a passenger through the windshield. That's it. that wreck stayed in one place.

 

The photons are crashing into each other at the same speed, so the point of collision would be zero, then micro black hole's gravitational pull and earths will attract each other, that's if the LHC creates them, which is a very dangerous if, specially if they create more than one of those buggers. I wonder what happens when black holes collide due to attraction?

 

Anywqa, hopefully in CERN's quest for the God particle, the mini big bang they create will eliminate us fast. Just hope I'm with my family if one of the two above happens instead of at work.

 

Hi all!

[swansont]

I noticed many here state that if two protons traveling at almost light speed collide in CERN's particle accelerator, The Large Hadron Collider, any micro black hole it creates would be moving so fast it would just fly through earth. How is that possible?

 

I saw two cars traveling at the same speed collide head on, and the only thing that was still moving was a passenger through the windshield. That's it, that wreck stayed in one place.

 

The protons are crashing into each other at the same speed, so wouldn't the point of collision be zero, meaning that micro black holes wont be moving anywhere except maybe down due to it's gravitational pull and Earth's core?

 

Please don't swiftboat me like BushCo., I just want to be tucked in.

 

Thanks!

 

I think you've misread the claims. The mini black holes that are moving quickly (assuming they are created) are from cosmic rays striking the fixed earth. At CERN the rest frame is the center-of-momentum frame, so products are indeed produced with zero net momentum.

 

 

(mod note: post moved from separate thread with similar topic)

[stingray78]

Dont be a paranoid. And if earth collides you wont even notice jeje

[Severian]

At CERN the rest frame is the center-of-momentum frame, so products are indeed produced with zero net momentum.

 

That isn't quite true. Since you are accelerating protons, but are really colliding the gluons within the proton, LHC events can often have a significant boost with respect to the lab frame. Nothing like as much as a cosmic ray of course.

[Ski]

I found out the LHC a few weeks ago, and at first it gave me a lot of anxiety. I literally was obsessed with the idea of the end of the world. I blame this on fear mongering.

 

However, I have looked into it more, and have found out that there is nothing to worry about. I know the chances are infinitesimally small, and if I am going to worry about the LHC, then I should worry about a lot of other things.

 

One thing I noticed is that the fears are very similiar to the ones that surrounded the RHIC:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RHIC

 

The LHC is not a completely new type of collidor, it is just more powerful.

 

As for the Fermi Paradox mentioned earlier, you cannot simply say that "we see no other civilizations because they built a LHC." There are a plethora of reasons for the Fermi Paradox, and of course people are going to flock to the most ominous one. Alarmists say "Maybe all other space civilizations built an LHC and got sucked into a black hole!" This argument is not valid. People probably made this argument when the RHIC came on, and when the Tetravon came on...you just can't make this assumption.

 

I would like to post a link to an article from the skeptical inquirer about the fear mongering surrounded the RHIC (although I feel that it is applicable to the LHC, since they are both the same, the LHC is just more powerful):

 

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2843/is_3_24/ai_62102225

 

Here is a link saying that even if we make 10 million black holes a year, only 10 will be captured by earth, and that's asuming if (a very big IF) Hawking Radiation doesn't work.

 

"Still, let's assume that even if Hawking is a genius, he's wrong, and that such black holes are more stable," Landsberg said. Nearly all of the black holes will be traveling fast enough from the accelerator to escape Earth's gravity. "Even if you produced 10 million black holes a year, only 10 would basically get trapped, orbiting around its center," Landsberg said.

 

However, such trapped black holes are so tiny, they could pass through a block of iron the distance from the Earth to the Moon and not hit anything. They would each take about 100 hours to gobble up one proton.

 

At that rate, even if one did not take into account the fact that each black hole would slow down every time it gobbled up a proton, and thus suck down matter at an even slower rate, "about 100 protons would be destroyed every year by such a black hole, so it would take much more than the age of universe to destroy even one milligram of Earth material," Landsberg concluded. "It's quite hard to destroy the Earth."

 

Mark, where did you hear these references that a black hole could suck in the earth in 5 minutes? Did you hear that from the MySpace anti-LHC group? That hardly qualifies as a scientific calculation. I'm going to believe Landsberg from the livescience article instead.

 

I know we should be careful about doing this, but science says that it is an infinitesimal chance. I have not heard of any physicist or particle physicist concerned about this project. It's not a big conspiracy to destroy the world. Scientists are not so reckless where they'd say "Oh, there's a probable risk, but we'll go ahead with it!" There is a difference between "probable" and "possible." You say that scientists are basing this off of theory, but think of how much theories are studied and tested before they become theories! There is a difference between hypothesis and theory.

 

Also, scientists are fully aware of the risks and are investigating the validity of doomsday claims. They have written 3 safety reports! The 3rd one should be released shortly.

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/29/science/29collider.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

 

“The possibility that a black hole eats up the Earth is too serious a threat to leave it as a matter of argument among crackpots,” said Michelangelo Mangano, a CERN theorist.

 

There are many good scientific reasons on why the LHC does not pose a threat to Earth. I am not a scientist, just someone who has been investigating these claims, but if I am understanding correctly, this is what would have to happen:

 

-Black holes would have to be formed in the first place

-Hawking Radiation would have to be wrong. Please note tht Hawking Radiation is not just a "theory" is has been studied for over 30 years.

-Black holes would have to produced with less escape velocity than earth.

-These black holes would have to accrete matter fast enough to pose a threat to earth before the sun expands.

 

And this is all ignoring the fact that high energy collisions from cosmic rays occur in the earth's upper atmosphere millions of times a day, and the surface of the moon too.

 

Factoring in all of these things, I think it for it is safe to say that there is nothing to worry about.

 

People say that the risk is too large to run the LHC, but let me remind you that there are plenty of things that can end life on earth:

 

-Meteor/Asteroid/Comet Impact

-Magnetic Poles reverse themselves

-Massive volcano eruption

-Global epidemic

-etc.

 

When the chances of anything bad happening at LHC are minute compared to other things that can end life on earth, it is time to stop worrying about them.

 

I agree, it is all fine and dandy to play devil's advocate, but physics says there is nothing to worry about. And unless everything we know about physics is wrong, then there is nothing to worry about.

 

Here is some more reading on the subject if you are interested:

 

http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=11690

 

http://twistedphysics.typepad.com/cocktail_party_physics/2008/03/doomsday-redux.html

 

http://www.astroengine.net/?p=161

 

http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/02/lhc-alarmists.html

 

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/30679

 

http://www.physforum.com/index.php?showtopic=4830

[bombus]

Some may be interested in the excerpt below from a paper by Nick Bostrom:

 

There have been speculations that future high-energy particle accelerator experiments may cause a breakdown of a metastable vacuum state that our part of the cosmos might be in, converting it into a “true” vacuum of lower energy density [45]. This would result in an expanding bubble of total destruction that would sweep through the galaxy and beyond at the speed of light, tearing all matter apart as it proceeds.

 

Another conceivability is that accelerator experiments might produce negatively charged stable “strangelets” (a hypothetical form of nuclear matter) or create a mini black hole that would sink to the center of the Earth and start accreting the rest of the planet [46].

 

These outcomes seem to be impossible given our best current physical theories. But the reason we do the experiments is precisely that we don’t really know what will happen. A more reassuring argument is that the energy densities attained in present day accelerators are far lower than those that occur naturally in collisions between cosmic rays [46,47]. It’s possible, however, that factors other than energy density are relevant for these hypothetical processes, and that those factors will be brought together in novel ways in future experiments.

 

The main reason for concern in the “physics disasters” category is the meta-level observation that discoveries of all sorts of weird physical phenomena are made all the time, so even if right now all the particular physics disasters we have conceived of were absurdly improbable or impossible, there could be other more realistic failure-modes waiting to be uncovered.

[swansont]

The main reason for concern in the “physics disasters” category is the meta-level observation that discoveries of all sorts of weird physical phenomena are made all the time' date=' so even if right now all the particular physics disasters we have conceived of were absurdly improbable or impossible, there could be other more realistic failure-modes waiting to be uncovered.[/i']

 

And we'll never know what they are unless we do experiments. So, we can go ahead and do them based on the risks we can assess, or we can stop all scientific experimentation because we're afraid of the dragons that live at the edge of the earth.

[bombus]

could this not have waited until we could do it in space though, just to be on the safe side?

[Klaynos]

could this not have waited until we could do it in space though, just to be on the safe side?

 

If we even had a feasible time scale on this, it's decades at the least probably ALOT more.... there is ALOT of kit, massive amounts, not to mention all the energy it uses... these things are not trivial...

[Kyrisch]

It's not like we would notice if our solar system was swallowed up. I mean, it would happen pretty damn quickly...

[Mr Skeptic]

It's not like we would notice if our solar system was swallowed up. I mean, it would happen pretty damn quickly...

 

I think we would notice if we were heading towards a black hole the size of our solar system. It would have to be massive!

[insane_alien]

we would notice the solar system getting eaten, its not as quick a process as you seem to think.

[Fanghur]

Ok, I have seriously had enough with these crackpot claims that the Large Hadron Collider will destroy the Earth. We already know 100% that it is not going to produce anything dangerous because last time I checked the Earth is still here. Even if this Walter Wagner moron is right and any black holes produced by cosmic rays would have enough velocity to escape the Earth's gravity, the Earth would still have been destroyed billions of years ago.

 

Think of it like this; let's assume for arguement's sake that LHC collisions (and therefore cosmic ray collisions, since cosmic rays make the LHC's power look like a battery compared to a fusion reactor) do have the power to produce stable micro black holes, but that they black holes produced by cosmic rays pass harmlessly through the Earth when they are created. Well, even if that were the case, everywhere in the universe is filled with a flux of cosmic rays which are constantly colliding with each other, interstellar dust, micro meteorites, planets, etc. Now, if each of those cosmic rays produced a micro black hole that went zooming off in a random direction in space, it stands to reason that if they were indeed stable that they would begin feeding on the interstellar hydrogen and grow in mass.

 

Now, since cosmic rays are everywhere in the universe, there would have to be literally billions of billions of trillions of black holes of various sizes zooming around the universe constantly growing bigger. Now answer me this, what are the odds that after all the 4.5 billion years the Earth has been around that not one of this flux of black holes has collided with the Earth, or any of the other planets or the Sun, or for that matter any of the other billions of stars we know of?

 

I'm on holidays right now, so you guys do the math.

[timo]

1:42. Happy hollidays.

[bombus]

If cosmic rays are so powerful (and I'm sure they are), why do we need to build the LHC at all? Can we not just study particles that get hit by cosmic rays? They are so numerous afterall.

 

Is the fact that the LHC slams particles together head-on at near light speed the difference? If so, does that not make the cosmic ray comparison a little shaky?

 

Please someone explain in very simple terms.

[timo]

The two key points are:

1) The controlled conditions. You know what stuff collides at which position at a known energy. And you can build huge detectors around that few cubic centimeters.

2) The extremely large amount of events (collision processes) you get. Often you hear that LHC opens new frontiers in energy scales but the increase in number of events (-> better statistics if you can handle the data) is just as important (only it sounds way less cool).

As a minor point 3 perhaps: We have a lot of experience with collider experiments. Analyzing cosmic radiation is a relatively new (but increasingly popular) field compared to experiments with artificially accelerated stuff.

[Klaynos]

Cosmic rays are pretty much random, you don't know what's going to hit where and with what energy, it's the way that experiments on particles used to be done, and there are still some experiments (like the HESS telescope and Pierre Auger Observatory), but fundamentally particle accelerators are far far more predictable, and controllable. You can also put all your detectors around the point of collision so you can detect even the very very short lived particles.

 

Athiest, I didn't read your post for some reason I always miss second pages with this theme...

Edited June 18, 2008 by Klaynos

[Mr Skeptic]

If cosmic rays are so powerful (and I'm sure they are), why do we need to build the LHC at all? Can we not just study particles that get hit by cosmic rays? They are so numerous afterall.

 

Is the fact that the LHC slams particles together head-on at near light speed the difference? If so, does that not make the cosmic ray comparison a little shaky?

 

Please someone explain in very simple terms.

 

Basically a balance between the cost&quality of the accelerator, and the cost&quality of the detector, as well as the value of controlled conditions. There are a few cosmic ray labs, but they have to point telescopes at the sky and get much poorer data than if the collision results themselves enter the detector. They do get free particles, some of which can be extremely high energy, but detecting the results is both much harder and much less complete.

[Base Pair]

Yeah, but it's still doable, and with the advances, coming to the market soon, in computer chip size and the amount of free memory space. We will more than likely see great breakthroughs in what can and can't be done in a lab. I, personally, know that this will be an interesting fifty years.

[bombus]

thanks for your answers everyone