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There are a lot of people worried that the world will end soon. This autumn, specifically, when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland and France turns on and starts smashing protons together at velocities that are nearly the speed of light. The main concern is that these collisions will create a miniature black hole that will swallow the Earth and us with it.
Thankfully for human civilization, black holes just don’t work this way.
While the basic level of understanding of science in the United States should be much higher than it is, the science underlying black holes is pretty arcane. While everyone really should remember the basic biology, physics, cosmology, geology, chemistry, ecology, and even genetics that they were taught in high school and maybe college (alas, science is too “nerdy” or “geeky” for most to care, never mind that footballs follow a predictable ballistic trajectory determined by Newton’s Laws of Motion), the science of black holes is strange enough that it’s simply not fair to expect everyone to have much knowledge of them beyond the fact that they exist. Understanding why a LHC-created mini black hole won’t eat the planet requires a basic understanding of how black holes work, some of the weirder things they can do, and why those weird things mean that we don’t need to worry about a mini black hole eating the planet.
Our discussion of black holes starts with stars. Stars have a life cycle - they’re born, the live a long, long time, and then they die out. How massive a star is determines how long it lives and the various ways it can die. Stars like our sun, Sol, are pretty average stars, and average stars live 10-30 billion years or so, then blow up to be bigger than the orbit of Venus (some stars can become bigger than Mars’ orbit, some 227 million km, an increase of over 300x larger than the sun is now). Then they go nova, blow off the outer layers of their surface, and gradually shrink down to a dense, cold cinder called a brown dwarf. Big stars, however, live fast and die young, completing their entire life cycle in tens to hundreds of millions of years instead of billions of years. Big stars expand as they’re about to die just like average stars do, but then they go supernova.
To understand why a star goes supernova, let’s talk about gravity and fusion reactions. Stars keep their size because the explosive power of the fusion reaction that drives the star is equaled by the force of gravity holding the star together. As a star ages, there’s less and less hydrogen (the main fuel of fusion) to keep the reaction going in the core, so the star starts to collapse under its own weight. When the core of a big star gets too dense, it shrinks until something else stops it, and when that happens the energy released basically blows up the rest of the star - a supernova. The result of a supernova is one of two things, either a neutron star or a black hole. A neutron star is what’s left if the original star wasn’t quite big enough to collapse so far that the force of gravity overwhelmed light - a black hole is what’s left if the original star was so big that it’s core can capture even light.
Black holes are named such because the force of their gravity is so great that light, the fastest thing that can exist according to Albert Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, cannot go fast enough to escape. The reason light can’t escape is essentially the same reason that rockets are huge to get the space shuttle off the Earth - it takes a certain amount of velocity (known as the “escape velocity”) to launch an object out of the Earth’s gravity altogether. When the escape velocity is greater than the speed of light, the body that creates that effect is called a black hole. The mathematical surface around the black hole’s center of mass where the escape velocity equals the speed of light is known as the “event horizon”.
Unfortunately, if light can’t escape past the event horizon, then neither can anything else - Einstein also proved mathematically that the speed of light is the universal speed limit, and no object made of matter can ever go any faster than that (in fact, nothing with mass can ever go that fast, but mass inflation and time dilation are topics for a different post). Anything that passes the event horizon is lost to this universe - only it’s gravity remains. So a black hole consumes matter and energy both.
There’s other ways to create black holes, though the collapsing star method is the only one that cosmologists are pretty sure they’ve directly observed. But Einstein also proved that energy and mass are equal, with a proportionality constant, using the equation e=mC2, where E is energy, m is mass, and C is the speed of light in a vacuum (i.e. space). Which means that, if you’ve got smaller mass but that is traveling REALLY fast (fast things have more energy than slow things do), it might be able to convert enough of that energy into mass in a collision to create a black hole. And this is where the LHC comes back in again.
The LHC is a circular particle accelerator housed underground and straddling the border between Switzerland and France. Its purpose is to test the fundamental laws of physics, specifically the existence of certain types of sub-atomic particles (especially the Higgs boson) and how they interact with each other. To do that, though, it has to accelerate protons to extremely high energy, 7 TeV (tera-electron-Volts, a thoroughly inconvenient unit for anyone not used to working with semiconductor physics and/or particles) per proton. When a collision occurs, the protons will disintegrate into sub-atomic particles that will be indirectly detected and measured by the huge and complex science test equipment around the collision point.
It’s this collision that people are worried about. Since energy equals mass, there’s a chance that the 14 TeV collision will create a small black hole. And given that, as mentioned above, black holes eat matter and energy, a tiny black hole would be a threat to the Earth, right?
Wrong. But we’ll take a brief break here for a brief musical interlude so that everyone whose eyes have glazed over to regain their senses for another round of science content (although I’m most definitely not a “she”…)
Welcome back.
Einstein was a brilliant man, but he didn’t know everything. No person, however bright, can know everything, and Einstein hated the entire idea of quantum mechanics, rejecting it as “spooky action at a distance” and famously quipping that (paraphrased) “God does not play dice with the universe.” Unfortunately for Einstein, quantum mechanics has become as firmly entrenched in physics as general relativity, and it took another brilliant man, Stephen Hawking, to realize that the two sometimes interacted in really, really weird ways.
At the quantum scale (lengths of an atom or less, 10-10 meters or shorter), recent theories of quantum mechanics say that space is foam of sub-atomic particles and antiparticles that pop in and out of existence due to the background energy of the universe. The equations of quantum mechanics say that this is possible so long as the total energy of this effect averages to 0 (zero), so for every particle that pops into existence another antiparticle (antimatter) also pops into existence. As weird as this sounds, scientists know that antimatter exists because particle physicists have created it in ultra-high vacuum chambers where it can’t interact with regular matter and annihilate itself. In fact, the medical PET scanner uses antimatter electrons known as positrons - PET stands for “Positron Emission Tomography”. Particles like this that pop in and out of existence are known in the science literature as “virtual particles” because they don’t hang around for long and their mass averages out to zero.
So, let’s propose that this foam of virtual particles is next to a black hole’s event horizon. Since particles and antiparticles can’t exist in the exact same spot without annihilating each other, the particle and antiparticle have to speed away from each other in opposite directions. Their movement makes it more likely that one will be lost into the black hole while the other will eventually escape the holes’ gravity. Because of conservation of mass and energy via general relativity, the particles (or antiparticles) that escape gradually reduce the mass of the black hole, effectively causing the black holes to evaporate. The emitted particles are known as “Hawking Radiation” after Stephen Hawking, and he also showed that bigger black holes evaporate more slowly than little black holes do.
So, if the LHC actually does create a mini black hole, then it will eventually evaporate into nothingness. And whether we need to worry about it or not will depend greatly on how fast it evaporates - if it evaporates faster than it can absorb new energy and/or mass and grow, then it’s ultimately harmless even if the LHC does create a mini black hole.
Let’s assume that the protons are each 7 TeV like the LHC FAQ says. Each 7 TeV proton then weighs about 1.2477 x 10-23 kg. Using the equation for rate of evaporation from Wikipedia, we find out that a black hole created by two 7 TeV protons colliding will evaporate into a burst of sub-atomic particles within 1.306 x 10-82 seconds. Or, if you prefer, 0.0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 01306 seconds.
The fastest laser pulses have been sub-femtosecond pulses, and those are only 10-15, or 0.000000000000001 seconds, and those are fast enough to catch the location of an electron as they orbit an atomic nucleus. Even at 99.999991% of the speed of light, any itty-bitty black hole created would move about 3.92 x 10-74 meters in that amount of time. That’s about 10-59 the way across the diameter of an electron. So we can safely say that any mini black holes created will not escape the LHC itself.
The LHC expects about 600 million (6 x 106) collisions like this per second, so there’s a small chance that two collisions could occur a the exact right time to combine. The chance of that happening, however, is roughly equivalent to the area of a proton collision compared to the area where the collision will occur. The LHC focuses the proton beams down to 64 microns (6.4 x 10-5 m) across, or an area of 3.217 x 10-9 m2 (circular area assumed). The area of a proton is only 2.405 x 10-30 m2, so the probability of multiple collisions at the same spot in space is 7.476 x 10-22. For comparison, this is a probability of about once every 100 billion lifetimes of the universe.
So, not only will any nano-black holes evaporate too fast to be a threat, the chance that the LHC beam will be able to create a nano black hole that MIGHT survive long enough to be a threat via the mechanism of multiple collisions at the same spot in space is so low that it probably hasn’t happened in the entire history of the universe to date, and probably never will. We certainly won’t be around to see it.
The real kicker here, though, is this: while the LHC is creating high energy protons artificially, the galaxy creates even higher energy particles (known as “cosmic rays”) all the time. We know that cosmic rays hit our atmosphere all the time because the shower of sub-atomic particles that the collisions create have been observed on the surface of the earth. If higher energy collisions are occurring all the time, then either a) nano black holes aren’t created by such collisions in the first place or b) those black holes evaporate harmlessly. And since the earth hasn’t been sucked up into a nano-black hole created by cosmic ray collisions yet, we can reasonably expect that the LHC won’t create a big enough black hole either.
Hopefully this science lesson has allayed your fears that the LHC will create a planet-eating black hole. It’s not the end of the world as we know it, but you should continue feeling fine.
UPDATE #1:
A few of the comments have suggested that the LHC will produce a stationary black hole if indeed it does create a black hole in the first place. This is not correct for primary non-elastic collisions, and I’ll explain why below. In addition, I’ll explain what happens in secondary collisions in Update #2. But first, a few quick definitions.
“elastic collision” - in an elastic collision, protons act like billiard balls, with the two protons bouncing off each other.
“Non-elastic collision” - if the two protons were billiard balls, a non-elastic collision would result in the explosion of both billiard balls or the fusion of both balls into a single ball.
“Primary collision” - the first collision of the two colliding protons as they pass through the collision region. In billiard terms, this would be the first time the cue ball hits another billiard ball.
“Secondary collision” - the second collision of a proton after an elastic collision with another proton. In billiard terms again, this would be the cue ball hitting a second ball after hitting the first, or the collision between a hit billiard ball and a second billiard ball.
First, if you look at the image at the LHC Collisions page, you see that Beams 1 and 2 do not intersect in a head-on collision. Because of this, there is no possible way that any resulting particle (and a nano black hole would be have mass and therefore be a “resulting particle”) from a primary collision can have zero velocity within the LHC. The image below shows two protons, A & B, heading toward a collision at the point that the two red arrows (vectors) intersect. Each of them is a 7 TeV energy proton traveling at 99.999991 % of the speed of light C. Notice if you will that they are traveling toward each other equally in the X-direction (left/right), but that because of the angle of their paths, they are both traveling in the negative Y-direction (down). If you’re familiar with vector mathematics, then the X velocity vectors are equal and opposite, but both have the same negative Y velocity vector.
This next image shows the two protons right before the non-elastic collision, when both are still traveling down, although they’ve both traveled to the intersection point.
The final image shows that nano black hole (particle C, composed of the dotted particles A and B) is all that’s left as a result of the non-elastic collision. Notice that the blue arrow, illustrating the direction of movement, is only pointing down. This is because the X-direction movement of A and B canceled each other out, but since there was no opposing force in the upward direction - both A and B were traveling downward - C must, according to the laws of conservation of mass and momentum, continue moving down.
Notice also that the speed of the resulting particle C is 99.9999996% of the speed of light, or even faster than the original two particles. This is due to the fact that the downward movement (negative Y velocity vectors) of the two particles A and B combine to produce a particle C that is moving even faster than either proton would be individually. According to Special Relativity and the gamma (γ) function as calculated using a 14 TeV mass for particle C.
Ultimately, though, what these three images show is that, since there is no opposing upward force (positive Y velocity vector) on particles A and B, particle C cannot come to a complete rest. So if particle C is a nano black hole, and if Hawking radiation doesn’t exist, then the nano black holes created by the LHC will pass through the Earth at very nearly the speed of light, never to return and eat the planet.
Update #2
In Update #1 above, I indicated that there could be secondary collisions, specifically if protons collided in an elastic (bouncing) fashion and the collided again. In this way, it’s actually possible to create a stationary particle. However, I’ll also show that a) the probability of a secondary collision being non-elastic is negligible.
The figure below shows the sequence of collisions that has to occur in order for our secondary non-elastic collision to produce a stationary particle.
The two green colored protons are from beam 1, the two magenta colored protons are from beam two. At positions A, the four protons are positioned so that they will collide in elastic collisions at point B. Because the collisions are elastic, the four protons bounce off each other at point B with the exact angles required (in three dimensions, although only two are shown for simplicity). Then two of the protons move to point C and collide in a non-elastic (destroying or fusing) collision that produces either the destruction of both protons or a single particle with a mass equal to the sum of the mass of the two colliding protons.
Because the momentum of the protons in both the X direction (left/right) and the Y direction (up/down) are equal and opposite, any resulting particle would be stationary. And if this were a nano black hole, and if Hawking radiation and evaporation didn’t occur, then it could become a problem over the long run. However, let’s talk about how likely this is.
According to the LHC collision page again, the number of collisions is defined by the the luminosity (1034 protons*sec-1cm-2) multiplied by the elastic cross-section of a proton at 7 TeV, or 40 mBarn (40 x 10-27 cm2). Using this number, I calculate that the number of collisions per second will be 1034 x 40 x 10-27, or 4 billion collisions per second (10x more than the LHC page calculates). Assuming my number is correct since it’s a worst-case situation, and dividing the number of collisions by the average number of proton clumps (2808) and further dividing that number by the number of cycles each bunch takes through the LHC every second (11245) and we have 127 elastic proton collisions per transition through a collision region.
However, we need to calculate the number of secondary non-elastic collisions, and for those, the luminosity (which used to be 1034 protons is now the number of elastic collided protons, or 127. 127 x 60 x 10-27 gives us 7.62 x 10-24 non-elastic collisions per second. To put this number into perspective, if the LHC ran non-stop for 10 years (about 3.16 x 108 seconds), we could expect .0000000000000024 collisions. Or, to put it another way, we could reasonably expect one collision of this type inside the LHC every 415 billion years.
And this assumes that the collision is exactly aligned right to produce a stationary combined particle. Given that a combined particle would have the default speed of 99.9999996% of the speed of light, if the alignment were off by one millionth of one percent, the particle would still go careening off harmlessly in some unpredictable direction at some slightly lower but still amazingly high percentage of the speed of light.
Image credits:
Valerio Mezzanotti for the New York Times
ParticlePhysics.ac.uk
Cern/Maximilien Brice, via the BBC
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I don’t know what the hell she just said but she sounded confident enough for me to believe that the earth is NOT going to be swallowed up.
How unfortunate? I was really looking forward to a change of pace!
So… is that a “yes” or a “no” on the tinfoil underwear?
Nice explanation. I still find anything quantum profoundly unsettling, though.
Very well written article. And the new LSAG safety document is also a very careful and well written document. I commend CERN for creating and releasing this very important document.
However, lets be clear, the document has not been externally validated outside of CERN yet! Lets give a chance for validation and counter views!
For a current well written opposition view, visit LHCFacts.org to see why several PHDs of Math, Physics and other Theoretical sciences argue just the opposite or your safety conclusions:
1. Dr. Adam D. Helfer: Do black holes radiate? “no compelling theoretical case for or against radiation by black holes“
2. Dr. Otto E. Rossler on micro black holes grow rates: “…after 50 months the earth to a centimeter would have shrunk. It would be nothing more there, not only no more life, there but also the earth would be… a small black hole.”
3. SPC committee on the LSAG safety report Neutron Star argument “but this argument relies on properties of cosmic rays and neutrinos that, while highly plausible, do require confirmation, as can be expected in the coming years.”
One of the problems with the cosmic ray theory of safety is that if cosmic rays could create neutral micro black holes, they would all travel harmlessly through Earth at nearly the speed of light, and no paper has been written that I am aware of the argues in detail why a cosmic ray particle impact with Earth must create a micro black hole just because a head on collider, colliding tightly packed groups of thousands of protons or Lead to Lead Nuclei head on in powerful magnetic fields might create a micro black hole (and one at low speed that might be captured by Earth’s gravity).
Just for the record, the following statement is extremely misleading, and really just not correct “Einstein hated the entire idea of quantum mechanics, rejecting it as “spooky action at a distance”
What Dr. Albert Einstein argued was that the true theory behind quantum mechanics should be based on calculated determinism rather than chance and probability. Entangled photons should be considered as no more mysterious than exact copies, or clones of each other. So there is no need for “spooky, faster than light action at a distance”.
Dr. Einstein’s analysis of deterministic Quantum Theory has been refined into what is now call Bohmian Quantum Theory, and it has recently been called at least as valid as non-deterministic standard quantum theory in predicting real world outcomes. Experiments are planned to determine if Bohmian Qantum Theory is actually a superior predictor of physical reality than non-deterministic Quantum Theory. Stay tuned!
(Excellent article detailing Bohmian Quantum Theory was published by NewScientist Magazine, “Quantum randomness may not be random”, 22 March 2008 by Mark Buchanan: New Scientist Link
Even if a black hole did come about inside the LHC, its mass would be so small, and hence its gravitational pull would be so small, that it wouldnt swallow up any matter since it couldnt attract any. A black hole doesnt magically just have “lots of gravity”, it has as much gravitational attraction as the matter that composed it has.
If the earth collapsed into a black hole for example, the moon wouldnt get sucked in, it would just continue orbiting the resulting black hole like nothing happened, because the black hole has the same gravitational attraction as the earth does. Same thing in the LHC, except the couple of protons that come together to form a mini black hole have such a small mass, that the gravitational attraction of the resulting black hole is essentially 0.
JTankers said:
You do realize that you just made my argument even stronger, right? Let me explain how - if cosmic ray collision in the upper atmosphere don’t have to create black holes, then neither do proton-proton collisions. In addition, even if proton-proton collisions do create black holes, the resulting impact is nearly guaranteed to produce a black hole that is traveling at nearly the speed of light itself, meaning that it too would pass harmlessly through the Earth.
Oleg - Thanks for making that point. The gravity of a dual-proton black hole is so small, and it’s diameter so tiny, that it would essentially be nothing, would be able to consume no other mass, and so would be totally harmless.
As someone who read The Theory of Relativity five times in order to understand it, i appreciate and applaud the explanation, Brian. (I kind of had to read it; an uncle gave it to me for HS graduation and signed it, “never let them tell you that it’s all relative”.)
But that’s not my point…am i the only one who’s a little bit disappointed by Brian proving that the world won’t end from a man-made black hole? I find the irony and poetic justice of this possibility delicious. So thanks for ruining my day, Brian.
Brian:
Thanks. You are a treasure.
It’s been many years since my own classes in quantum mechanics, and much has been discovered and/or added to theory since then. Hawking radiaion was known during my undergrad years, but it was a new concept, and Hawking himself hadn’t reached the legendary status he has, today. I appreciate the update. Makes me feel old, but like an elderly, appreciative guy.
A quick question about the speed of light limit: Are there no such things as tachyons? What’s the latest on them?
In general principal, I agree with Oleg (with what little I know of quantum physics), though it makes me nervous. It reminds me of Einstein’s explanation for why he opted to work on the Philadelphia Experiment rather than the Manhattan Project in WWII. Perhaps he knew nuclear weapons would work and was only making excuses to try and dissuade the U.S. from going down that path. However, he claimed that a nuclear weapon wouldn’t work because trying to initiate the chain reaction was akin to playing billiards on a football field. The particles were too small and too far apart to effectively start the chain reaction. Obviously, he was wrong.
Articles like this make me think of the Drake Equation. Considering we believe the Universe to be approximately 15 billion years old, that’s seems like a fair amount of time for other civilizations to reach the technological level such that they would emit non-naturally occurring radio waves, thus making them detectable to us. Granted, there are potentially large distances involved, which adds to the time it would take for us to detect them. And there are likely other variables in play as well. Still, the odds that we’re the first such civilization seem highly unlikely. I can’t help but wonder how many intelligences out there may have winked out of existence because they played with fire without first checking how much fuel they would have needed.
I’m not suggesting we should halt research. Exploration is in our very nature. It’s just food for thought.
Well, Brian, your explanation is fine as far as it goes.
However, you said “nothing (can) travel faster than the speed of light…” except the information transfer in particle pairs due to ’spooky action at a distance.’ The only way to understand THAT is to assume there’s something wrong (or incomplete) with the standard model of space and position. Plus there is a theory that gravity should be stronger than it is, but isn’t because it’s actually leaking in from another universe. So, to my limited understanding of these things, couldn’t it be just possible that a micro-black-hole could pull matter and energy form another universe, enough to grow to significance? Or instead of a black hole, a tiny wormhole could open and begin to leak us into another universe with its own set of rules?
I admit the chances are excellent that nothing bad will happen. But don’t blame us for worrying about unforeseen consequences. I, for one, will be hoping we don’t end up with some high-tech version of “Hey ya’ll… watch this!” That’s what mucking with the unknown entails…. and our experiments should, and will, proceed. I’m just sayin’.
Although I’d feel better about your explanation, too, if you were able to use “it’s” and “its” correctly.
man creates AIDS, AIDS KILLS MAN, MAN CREATES THE GNOME MAP, Now there is cloning.
man creates a tiny little black hole. when have you seen that man has limits on what i can create.
i guess man does not deserve to survive. wake up people.
Why Even Do This If The Experts Already Know Everything?
The theory that these experiments will not create apocalyptic black holes or even strangelets is very exotic, and likely wrong. We are all betting our lives on some very tricky equations! Besides, couldn’t the money wasted on all this esoteric research be better used to finance wind power or something?
Huh ? or;
Ditto to what TheIndyVoice said.
To quote from the article, “No person, however bright, can know everything.”
With luck, one knows enough.
I don’t know what you mean by a “negative mass particle”. If there were such a thing, one would expect that it would be repelled by gravity rather than attracted. I’ve never heard of that happening.
So whats happens when they fire up and its all a success? They create a micro black hole and then start talking about another lost piece of the universe and decide to ramp up to a larger and larger colliders. So you go from micro to a mini black hole.
Scientists are not going to stop until 2 things happen. 1) They run out of money 2) They actually create a black hole large enough to rip chunks of Earth.
But wait! Isn’t the singularity at the heart of a black hole supposed to be the infinite balance of negative vs. positive? If the universe is a bubbling “foam†of matter/ant-matter, wouldn’t that also be the same as an infinite balance of positive vs. negative? So therefore, couldn’t you say we exist in a singularity? So perhaps we exist, thinking our Universe is expansive, but in fact we live in an infinitely small singularity in some other Universe. So why does my credit score matter? And why CAN’T I cheat on my spouses…, um, I mean spouse?
So an average genius like Einstein didn’t know everything but our super geniuses of today do?
Maybe this sort of thing is why project SETI hasn’t found anything out there. I can just see some eight
legged alien scientist saying to one of his fellows: ” Hey Zokar, watch this ! ” and a few seconds later
an entire solar system is gone. Only kidding. Go for it. Nothing will probably go wrong…..go wrong….go wrong.
And even if you do accidentally blow up the world at least you will be denying Bush that honor by beating him to the punch. Hurry before he finds out what you are doing.
only if we could get these brilliant minds to save our planet.
For such a clearly stated disquisition on so dense a subject (to me at least, and no pun intended), I usually go to Powerline or The Corner for enlightenment. Now, they KNOW black holes. They suck the life out of everything.
This was quite interesting, thanks…
Brian,
A great article.
For once you and I agree 100% on something:)
Jeff
Great! The earth will not be swallowed up. Assuming that’s true, is anyone concerned about more subtle effects? How about widespread depression, increased rates of miscarriage, suicide, and certain cancers, just for example? I’m speculating of course, but the key thing is that nobody’s even concerned about such “low-level” effects.
Just think, emissions from a little bitty cell phone used by a pregnant woman can affect the behavior of her child after birth. Other biological effects have yet to be proven, and are still widely denied, but even the scientists who study these effects admit that they use a wired headset with their own mobile phones–they say it’s just common sense not to hold such a thing next to your head.
Could it be that this little Large Hadron Collider might have unexpected biological effects on mankind? Does anyone care about that? Or does the crude assurance that it’s “not going to swallow the earth” enable us to lapse back into complacency?
A good question to ask would be, how close do the scientists stand to the LHC? How much shielding is required? What are the attendant security measures, safety protocols, alarm systems, etc. I bet they’ve got a pretty good fence around the thing. Seeing that would give more cause for alarm than is expressed here.
But of course, we won’t hear about the effects for 20-30 years or so…Just as the wealthiest among us are boarding their private spaceships and abandoning this devastated planet…
Yes, it’s far-fetched. No, it’s not unthinkable.
I’m sorry but you sound incredibly pompous as if we know how a black hole works like we do a wristwatch. Hawking radiation has not been proven- it’s just a theory. We have put a lot of physics into how they work but we don’t anything for sure- the universe is a violent and chaotic place. We have never had an experiment on this level before on Earth. Nothing is for sure and should be taken for granted. Hubris before the fall.
Thomas Brown said:
The problem is that the kind of transfer of information that is occurring isn’t useful in a classical sense. You can’t transfer bits of digital data, for example, only quantum information that, by it’s very nature, is probabalistic in nature. And if you transfer the quantum information that there’s a 50/50 chance that the other side is a 0 or a 1 (digital bit), so what? At this point, there has been no recorded examples of classical information transfer via quantum entanglement.
Nope. The Hawking radiation you denegrate has more theoretical proof behind it than the multiple universe theory you’re implying here. Furthermore, you have you science backwards - the theory is that gravity should be much less than it is and that the additional gravity is from alternate universes. Even if the multiple universes theory is correct, however, there is no evidence that any energy or mass is capable of transitioning between universes - only gravity appears to make the connection.
Blues said:
And you know this how and why? Examples and/or links would be appreciated.
Whether the money spent on the LHC is money better spent on other things is a question of moral and ethical values - how do you value scientific progress as compared to alternative energy research. And that’s a question I’ve no even tried to address here. That alone could be a series of probably hundreds of posts.
Bob said:
I’m neither denigrating Einstein nor elevating more recent geniuses above him by suggesting that Einstein couldn’t know everything. All scientific advances form a continuum, with the work of one genius building upon the foundation of the work of prior geniuses. Einstein couldn’t have done the work he did without the work of Kepler, Newton, Maxwell, et al. Similarly, Hawking couldn’t have done his work without the work of Einstein, Bell, Shannon, Bohr, et al.
Mishkin-Fishkin asked:
In answer to your first question, it’s possible, but you have to ask what the probability is of such unexpected biological effects. The LHC is buried underground 50 to 175 meters for two purposes - it was cheaper since acquiring the farmland above the ground would have cost too much, and 50 meters of rock minimum is a great way to shield the detectors from natural cosmic ray radiation and, similarly, to shield organisms on the surface from any radiation created by the proton collisions. See the LHC UK FAQ. The LHC radiation, when turned on, would likely be lethal - 50-175 meters of rock prevents that from leaking out.
arouet said:
And, if various m-dimensional theory dimensions are “large,” and the LHC actually creates nano black holes, then we may actually be able to experimentally observe Hawking radiation. Which, given how harmless such a small black hole would be due to how fast it would evaporate (or, if it doesn’t, how quickly it’ll pass through the earth and out the other side) would be very cool.
Good article. I’m glad science is far more responsible today than it once was. I do recall reading somewhere that during the first tests of the nuclear bomb, some scientists on the project were unsure if the nuclear reaction would *ever* stop, so they weren’t entirely sure if they were about the destroy the Earth. Lucky for us, they didn’t!
I guess what I find bothersome, and it’s very likely stemming from the superstitious aspect of our nature, is that while it’s “very very very very . . . very unlikely”, it’s still -possible-. And not just “my mind is wandering, I’ll concede that -x y or z- is -possible-”. … That is, we’ll be smashing a lot of bits together which has a MUCH higher possibility of causing multiple micro-black holes in proximity, yet if we only collide 2 particles at a time, we reduce the chance of “multiples” to 0. Wouldn’t that be “safer”? At least until we measure and observe a few micro-black holes (if they even form)?
I just worry about the arrogance of man on occasion. We didn’t “know” how radiation from atomic weapons worked, and we killed and destroyed the lives of a lot of soldiers during those experiments. I get nervous when a fellow geek says “bah, the probability is way low. What happens if I do this?”
Given the Hawkins Radiation theory, assuming it’s at least partially correct, what’s to say the energy from the collider isn’t interfering with “natural processes” enough to cause an otherwise “innocuous” micro-black hole to become a raging monster? That is, if the balance of matter popping in and out of existence, coupled with the tendency of “negative particles” to be absorbed more readily by a black hole, is “artificially blocked”, that means the micro-black hole -could- feed on matter inside the collider. That would cause the black hole to grow, would it not? At least until it breached the collider and the “natural limiting effect” could take over.
So, what happens if we have a 5 ft wide black hole stuck underground?
And, while I’m pretty rusty on my quantum mechanics (more like illiterate), I was under the impression that we “knew” that black holes were actively sucking matter IN, and we just didn’t know where that matter went. When, exactly, did we measure/test/observe that to not be the case? Or is that all “mathematical theory” where someone might have forgotten to carry the 1?
I guess, without having a hand full of PhDs in my pocket, I should try to understand what’s being said the best I can and “trust” that the scientists working on this aren’t overstepping their understanding. … at least it’s in France, away from here
…. I just worry when the answer is “well, it should work ‘in theory’ “…
I’m with Savantster on the “arrogance of man” worry… it’s like handing a monkey the car keys and telling him to be careful. Plus, if Brian is wrong and we all get spaghettified, I won’t be able to mock him. I resent that.
Savantster said:
Yep, and that’s what the LHC is doing - they’re creating small numbers of proton collisions and at lower energy first, seeing what happens, then gradually boosting the LHC to full power and full beam density. It’ll take them months to go from first protons (in May) to full power (sometime this autumn).
As for “possibility,” it’s possible that you’ll tunnel through that wall using particle-wave duality just like an electron can tunnel through a material that it lacks the energy to get through due to the fact that it has a wave-like nature. But the probability is so low that tunneling of anything larger than an electron has never been observed. It’s possible that you’ll be killed in a bio-terror attack, but it’s FAR more probable that you’ll die in a car accident.
I understand that people react to exceedingly improbable horrible outcomes more than they react to very likely unpleasant outcomes - it’s part of human psychology. And the LHC qualifies - just because I can say that it’s infinitesimally unlikely (but still possible) that the LHC will be dangerous, some people will simply latch onto the infinitesimal probability and never let go - even as they worry so much that they die of a stress-induced heart attack or stroke instead of a nano black hole.
There is a fine balance between the fear of the dark our ancestors had 50,000 years ago that kept them from being eaten by lions, and being cautious in the face of a new dark found after shining a light into the shadow.
I guess I still have a bit of my instinct intact even though I mock the average joe with their seemingly infantile level of trepidation at almost all things (except the NFL, NASCAR and Monster Trucks, it seems). We’re talking about releasing never before seen particles and pretending like “the math is done, stop worrying!” means it’s as factual as the sun rises in the east.
I’m not stressing over it, I’m kind of excited, actually. And, if in the end it -does- destroy the planet.. Meh, we’ll all be dead and it won’t matter much. Right?