Black hole in LHC?

I wonder how difficult it is to get into scientific journalism? It's something I've always pondered doing.. it really hurts to see such terrible articles being written

I think, unfortunately, you would be a very unpopular journalist. Which means, they know very well what they are writing I'm afraid. I wish I'm wrong.

That may be true, but then again I've seen some very good scientific columns/sections of certain (free) papers. I'm fully of the opinion that it can be done: that is, one can sell a subject to the general public without having to sensationalise it: especially something like the LHC.

That may be true, but then again I've seen some very good scientific columns/sections of certain (free) papers. I'm fully of the opinion that it can be done: that is, one can sell a subject to the general public without having to sensationalise it: especially something like the LHC.

By the way, this issue is exploding in the UK at the moment. It was a lead item on news radio this morning ("Today"), and the satire shows are really panning physicists (Mock the Week on BBC2 yesterday and Armando Iannucci's Charm Offensive on Radio 4 while I'm writing this!). CERN need to get their PR machine working...

The Large Hadron Collider is recreating the first moments of our universe, which is actually the most extreme historical re-enactment society you can ever get.

In short, no. I don't understand the rationale, particles won't be accelerated to the speed of the light under any circumstance in the LHC. Very close to it, but not quite there. Particles collide at far less than the speed of light in other colliders, and everyday in the upper atmosphere and we are still here. I don't know if your teacher was joking or if you just misunderstood him, but I can't tell you where he's coming from here.

Dr Adrian Kent, a seriously qualified quantum theorist of DAMPT at Cambridge, has worries:

"What's an Acceptable Risk for Destroying the Earth?

From time to time, people have raised the worry that a particular physics experiment just might destroy the Earth. The first time this was seriously considered seems to have been before the first A-bomb and H-bomb tests. More recently, the possibility was raised that, if unknown physics included some particularly unfortunate features, the RHIC experiments at Brookhaven, or the forthcoming ALICE collider experiments at CERN, could have disastrous consequences. When physicists address these worries at all, they've tended to argue that (a) something would have to be very wrong with our understanding of physics for the risk to be present at all, (b) even if it is, we can show on empirical grounds that any risk must be so small that the possibility just isn't worth worrying about. Which rather begs the question, of course: how small *is* an acceptable risk? On this point, the various analyses seem to have been extraordinarily cavalier. At various times physicists have argued for going ahead with experiments without further ado on the basis of risk bounds ranging from 1 in 5000 (!) (the first Brookhaven analysis of the RHIC experiments) through 1 in 300,000 (Compton's estimate of the probability of igniting the Earth's atmosphere in the first A-bomb test) to 1 in 50,000,000 (the CERN analysis of the RHIC experiments). It seems to me that a little thought suggests all these risk bounds are far, far too large for comfort."

II. HISTORICAL EXAMPLES
The first catastrophe mechanism seriously considered seems to have been the possibility, raised in the 1940s at Los Alamos before the first atomic bomb tests, that fission or fusion bombs might ignite the atmosphere or oceans in an unstoppable chain reaction. Investigation led to an analysis by Konopinski et al. [3] which fairly definitively refuted the possibility. Compton was later reported, in a published interview [4] with Pearl Buck, as saying that he had decided not to proceed with the bomb tests if it were proved that the chances of global catastrophe were greater than three in a million, but that in the event calculation proved the figures slightly less.

A black hole ate my planet

...

Yet in November 1975, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists claimed that Arthur Compton, a leading member of the Manhattan Project, had said that there really was a risk of igniting the atmosphere. It turned out to be a case of Chinese whispers: Compton had mentioned the calculation during an interview with the American writer Pearl Buck, who had got the wrong end of the stick.

From page two of "A critical look at risk assessments for global catastrophes" by Adrian Kent http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-ph/pdf/0009/0009204v6.pdf:

... At various times physicists have argued for going ahead with experiments without further ado on the basis of risk bounds ranging from 1 in 5000 (!) (the first Brookhaven analysis of the RHIC experiments) through 1 in 300,000 (Compton's estimate of the probability of igniting the Earth's atmosphere in the first A-bomb test) to 1 in 50,000,000 (the CERN analysis of the RHIC experiments). It seems to me that a little thought suggests all these risk bounds are far, far too large for comfort." ....

If the LHC produces millions of black holes, would these mini black holes combine to a larger one which does not evaporate and has the ability to suck things in??

Hi chinatruth!

A black hole has no sucky-power …

a black hole has exactly the same gravitational attraction as any star of the same mass.

It doesn't vacuum-up the things around it …

it's like one of those sea-creatures that just sits there open-mouthed and hopes other things swim into it.

Anything that goes past a black hole, however close, carries on past it, just like a comet "grazing" the sun.

Black holes in space only get larger because of collisions between other bodies, accidentally sending one of them in just the right direction.

And anything that accidentally falls into a black hole would have crashed into a star of the same mass in the same position long before.

If the sun or the moon were replaced by a black hole of the same mass, we wouldn't notice any difference (well, except for it being darker ).

An uncharged mini-black hole would find it very difficult to hit anything!

Even a charged mini-black hole would probably just go into "orbit" round an ordinary particle (like an electron "orbiting" a nucleus) … and if it did manage to swallow anything of the opposite charge, it would become uncharged.

At various times physicists have argued for going ahead with experiments without further ado on the basis of risk bounds ranging from 1 in 5000 (!) (the first Brookhaven analysis of the RHIC experiments)...

It reports that CERNs top theorists are suggesting we shouldn't worry. I'd be much happier if Moscow and CalTech had produced such a comment. Aren't CERN theorists just slightly :-) interested parties? There's a one in many millions chance of Dr CERN-Theorist being exterminated if CERN goes online, but zero chance of them getting a Nobel if it doesn't! So the odds look great to them...