Large Hadron Collider Poll
cyborgdreamer 23 Sep 2008
My understanding is that the physicists (even the ones doing work on the LHC) do not rule out the possibility of a mini black hole being created but they feel that it will simply evaporate too quickly to do any harm thanks to Hawkings radiation. Hawkings radiation is purely theory with NOTHING but speculation and reams of mathematical models to back it up. Mathematical models have also indicated a near infinite number of solutions for string theory. Scientists have not proved infallible in the past so why the sudden blind trust?
it is irrelevant to the fate of the world if tiny black holes are created and they do not evaporate.
QUOTE (jaydfox)Luckily, such a small black hole would take a very, very long time to swallow the earth. Probably billions, if not trillions of years. At first, its surface area would be smaller than a proton: it would have a hard time swallowing the occasional atom.
By the time the black hole could work itself up to the size of a large atom (say, a nanometer in diameter), it would have a mass oon the order of 10^15 kg, the merest fraction of the earth's mass. At that size, even if we assumed that material was being sucked in at the speed of light, through a surface area of about 12.5 nm^2, the rate of mass consumption would only be about:
1.25x10^-17 m^2 * 3x10^8 m/s = 3.8x10^-9 m^3/s
That's 4 cubic millimeters per second. That's nothing. After a billion seconds, about 30 years, that's four cubic meters. Still nothing. After 30 million years, that'd be 4 million cubic meters, less material than is spewed from a large volcanic eruption.
We don't need to worry about black holes this small, even if Hawking radiation doesn't exist.
QUOTE (Jaydfox)Of course it would accelerate. By the time the black hole could double in mass, it would have four times the surface area, so the rate of mass consumption would increase by a factor of four. So four cubic millimeters per second would go up to 16 cubic millimeters per second! To get a lower bound on the time it would take to double in mass from 10^15 kg to 2x10^15 kg, let's assume the full 16 cubic millimeters per second, and let's assume a density of 25 grams per cubic centimeter.
At 1.6*10^-8 m^3/s * 2.5*10^4 kg/m^3, we get 4*10^-4 kg/s. So it would take about, oh, 2.5*10^18 seconds to double in mass, as a lower bound. That's billions of years, to accelerate by a factor of four. The next factor of four would take half the time (twice the mass through four times the surface area), so the acceleration itself would accelerate. But it would take billions of years before the acceleration had any meaningful effect.
The bottom line is, a black hole this small is effectively insignificant, at least as far as the fate of earth is concerned.
http://www.imminst.o...mp;#entry138019
do please at least try to find old threads on the subject and restart those, instead of making brand new ones that need to go through all the stages the old ones already went through before any new information is brought forth...
Instead of humans being afraid of viruses and bacteria, there would be a new threat to humanity, these little damn black holes floating around and through our Earth. Sounds great.
So elrond, how would you like one of these black holes shooting through your body? There wouldn't be a way to contain them because they would inevitably devour all matter in their way!
Since black holes have mass, wouldn't they just fall into the center of the Earth?
kismet 23 Sep 2008
That's my idea of how those experiments can change life.Any advance in our knowledge of physics will make life better in the long term. The risks with the LHC are negligible. There's no reason not to run it.
I have yet to get an answer to my oft repeated question. How has mine or anyone else on this forums lives been enhanced by the discovery of the slepton, the Mu or the Tau? The Higgs Boson is just another few pages in the text books and a Noble for the scientists. I am not against big science, just against pointless big science that has an element of risk to the entire planet.
Getting closer to understanding the beginning of time and space - the beginning of everything. Getting closer to understanding the universe. Finding out whether life, religion or god can be explained by physics are definitely not worth our time, are they? Or we could just live forever in our small caves, that we call 'the world'.
I strive to live forever, but I don't want to achieve my goal by being a coward and avoiding even the tinniest risks. Only knowledge will allow us to live forever. First knowledge of our body, but eventually we'd need to overcome heat death, proton decay and other problems that require such experiments and thorough understanding of physics.
I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space.
forever freedom 23 Jan 2009
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
mentatpsi 23 Jan 2009
Thanks again for the post.
Edited by mysticpsi, 23 January 2009 - 07:04 PM.
mentatpsi 23 Jan 2009
Ebenonce 11 Feb 2009
If you're wondering how/where I found out, I actually own Scientific Concerns which was formerly LHC Concerns.
I actually re bumped an old thread about the LHC where my site was linked, but this one seems more current, so I added it here.
and cast my vote
kismet 07 Apr 2009
What next will people start to believe in god when scientists say "the existence of an omnipotent god does not seem possible".
"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." How's that even possible? Are you going to tell me the scientists haven't done the math before or suddenly discovered a new magic formula predicting the end of the world?
Or maybe it's just that...
"Jeez– read the abstract. It’s a calculation based on a theoretical model using some very speculative physics for which there is NO EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER. Really. Ignore it.
The main thing to keep in mind is, cosmic rays have energies vastly higher than the LHC. If the LHC could produce black holes, then there would be black holes floating around everywhere."
Edited by kismet, 07 April 2009 - 05:23 PM.
forever freedom 08 Apr 2009
edit: i'm not saying they're incompetent -'im sure they're as competent as its humanly possible. actually, that's the problem; they're just faulty humans.
Edited by forever freedom, 08 April 2009 - 05:12 PM.
kismet 10 Apr 2009
Pretty cool facts (if true):
This is an elaboration of "At first, its surface area would be smaller than a proton: it would have a hard time swallowing the occasional atom." (I think that's what jaydfox said)
"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." (By Prufrock on Jan 27, 2009)
Edited by kismet, 10 April 2009 - 01:40 PM.
Arcanyn 14 Jun 2009
Edited by pyrovus, 14 June 2009 - 12:40 PM.
Lallante 21 Apr 2010
Guacamolium 21 Apr 2010
It's one thing that we have to do to get the unified theory of physics completed.
Alex Libman 09 May 2010
Edited by Alex Libman, 09 May 2010 - 12:55 PM.
chris w 09 May 2010
Yeah, because both DARPA and NASA produced useless pieces of junk in the sixties that had absolutely nothing to do with Internet and space exploration. You're more than a libertarian, you're a libertarian gospel preacher, Alex.If it requires government funding, then it isn't worth doing, and the resources spent on doing it by force are harming more valuable and timely scientific research that will not be undertaken as the result.
Edited by chris w, 09 May 2010 - 03:12 PM.
Alex Libman 09 May 2010
niner 10 May 2010
Alex, you lived in the Soviet Union back in the day, right? I can see where your opinion of government has been colored, but I have to say that all governments are not identical. This is making me wonder if libertarianism isn't some sort of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder...Imagine that you're planning to buy a new pickup truck sometime in the future, perhaps when your current one breaks down, and your local mafia boss finds out and rushes in to "help". He forbids you to go to any dealers or test-drive any cars, and delivers a slightly lemony Toyota Corolla that you could have bought yourself for $15,000, charges you $80,000, tells you that you're only allowed to buy fuel from his friend's gas station across town, and warns you that he'll throw you in prison if you ever look under the hood without his permission. Oh, and if you don't kiss his butt with gratitude he'll get upset and call you a traitor or a mental case, etc. That is a perfect analogy for how government works, with R&D as well as everything else!
e Volution 10 May 2010
Re black holes I think you just can't go pasts cosmic rays hitting our atmosphere... End of argument.
chris w 10 May 2010
If your analogy was to be applied to the 2 of my examples then the big bad mafia boss would actually be the first man to ever build anything like a pick up truck, and a couple of decades later it is available for wholesome citizens to build up on the initial gansta project and create whatever crazy trucks they imagined ( think of space tourism for bored Russian millionairies, Internet speaks for itself I guess ).Imagine that you're planning to buy a new pickup truck sometime in the future, perhaps when your current one breaks down, and your local mafia boss finds out and rushes in to "help". He forbids you to go to any dealers or test-drive any cars, and delivers a slightly lemony Toyota Corolla that you could have bought yourself for $15,000, charges you $80,000, tells you that you're only allowed to buy fuel from his friend's gas station across town, and warns you that he'll throw you in prison if you ever look under the hood without his permission. Oh, and if you don't kiss his butt with gratitude he'll get upset and call you a traitor or a mental case, etc. That is a perfect analogy for how government works, with R&D as well as everything else!
Edited by chris w, 10 May 2010 - 01:17 PM.
chrwe 10 May 2010
By the way, the fact that the first run went awry because of a bird dropping a baguette in it almost made me believe in "higher forces" with a definitive sense of weird humor which I can much appreciate
Edited by chrwe, 10 May 2010 - 12:58 PM.
chris w 10 May 2010
I wish all this money went to SENS. But seeing that it doesnt anyway, far-off seeming technology and research has often (in the long run) brought about dramatic changes in technology that actually benefits people. So I hope that we will see this long-term effect here, too.
By the way, the fact that the first run went awry because of a bird dropping a baguette in it almost made me believe in "higher forces" with a definitive sense of weird humor which I can much appreciate
And if we accidentally stumble upon God in there somewhere, then we won't need SENS anymore
Edited by chris w, 10 May 2010 - 02:10 PM.
Alex Libman 10 May 2010
Your growing on me Alex Libman Still totally disagree with you on all things nutrition though!
Thank you.
I know that I might be wrong about the health benefits of veganism (or my "Tax Resister Diet", as I call it), and I tried to attach that disclaimer to all threads where I've advocated it. I'm only about ~6 month into that experiment, and I wouldn't have carried it this far if the perceived results were not sufficiently positive. It could be perfectly subjective, especially since I'm overweight, have awful family medical history, and I find it next to impossible to consistently limit my meat / fish portions to minuscule amounts at which the benefits aren't outweighed by the harms.
ChromodynamicGirl 12 Oct 2010
That being said, the LHC is not going to destroy the Universe. The energy levels are insignificantly small to stuff like Gamma-ray bursters. Or the sun.
revenant 25 Jan 2011
Edited by revenant, 25 January 2011 - 03:52 PM.