Could the Large Hadron Collider Create a Black Hole That Threatens Earth?

[james77]

Again, we have seen many higher-energy particle collision elsewhere in our universe. The Auger Observatory measurements from AGNs, for example, are detecting particles with energies several orders of magnitude higher than what the LHC can ever dream of getting. This implies that not only are there particles of significantly higher energies, but also that when these particles collide, they do not produce any black hole to swallow anything. The RHIC safety analysis report clearly indicated this by mentioning the fact that the moon is still there!

Again, this is a reasonable observation. However it's possible that the reason why MBHs don't form in the high outer atmosphere maybe due to a case of matter starvation, there's literally no way for them to get going out there. Also I don't think anyone knows for sure exactly how the Earth's natural electromagnetic field functions in these collisions and I'm not sure that comparing it with the LHC at CERN is really the same thing.

 

[atyy]

<Are you nevertheless certain it won't destroy the earth? > Well, you've never been to my kitchen at dinner time!

The RHIC safety analysis report clearly indicated this by mentioning the fact that the moon is still there!

Deary me, I seem to remember from basic quantum mechanics that the moon is not necessarily there unless we look! I'm not looking at the moon at the moment. I hope it is not presently in your kitchen.

 

[james77]

Deary me, I seem to remember from basic quantum mechanics that the moon is not necessarily there unless we look! I'm not looking at the moon at the moment. I hope it is not presently in your kitchen.[/QUOTE]



Einstein (and many others) were not particularly happy with this notion of the observer having to be present at some critical state of observation (do animals and plants qualify too!) in order for some event (the moon rising for example) to happen in our everyday world or, to say "the moon only exists at that particular moment in time when I choice to watch it". Our whole sense of Scientific understanding seems to say otherwise, i.e. that there were loads of very important events going on this planet over millions of years, long before man came on the scene. Yet, quantum mechanics is very strange in that it puts the observer centre stage, rather than the mere objective observation and collection of facts.

Also you shouldn't use the word "deary" unless you work in Blackpool after ten at night

 

[Vanadium 50]

However it's possible that the reason why MBHs don't form in the high outer atmosphere maybe due to a case of matter starvation, there's literally no way for them to get going out there.

Good grief, this keeps getting sillier and sillier.

Let's review the "black holes are dangerous" argument. The first ingredient is that the coupling of TeV-scale black holes to matter is much stronger (like forty or fifty orders of magnitude) than we think. The next ingredient is that they don't immediately evaporate via Hawking Radiation - i.e. the coupling of TeV-scale black holes to matter is much weaker than we think - by the same forty orders of magnitude.

I'm willing to believe either that the coupling is much stronger or much weaker than we think it is - but not both at the same time.

Now there is the argument that this quasi-stable black hole doesn't go flying into space, because it's heavy and produced "at rest". Well, the heaviest black hole that can be produced is about 3 TeV, and >99.998% of all 3 TeV objects are produced moving faster than escape velocity. This depends only on the conservation of momentum. So we have to give that up too.

Now we have the argument that a cosmic ray induced black hole "doesn't get started" before it strikes the ground, unlike an accelerator produced black hole. That means it must evaporate before it strikes the surface, so it's Hawking lifetime must be less than 5 ns (in its rest frame) - actually much less, because this is the requirement for the average black hole, and we need to know the slowest black hole. Nonetheless, let's do the calculation and we find our less-than-escape-velocity black hole can travel no more than 7mm before it decays. That places it in the beampipe, where there is nothing but hard vacuum.

So the atmosphere isn't dense enough, but vacuum is? This makes no sense.

An earlier poster talked about "respect". As ZapperZ says, it cuts both ways - proposing an internally inconsistent fantasy is not very respectful. Furthermore, I think you don't appreciate how offensive you are being - do you really think that 5000 physicists are all such evil people that we are willing to murder six billion people (including our families and our friends) to perform an experiment? That each and every one of us is worse than Hitler, worse than Stalin, worse than Mengele? That none of us have a better developed set of ethics than a cartoon mad scientist?

If someone came up to you in a bar and called you a mad scientist worse than Mengele and a likely mass murderer, you might well punch him in the nose. But from scientists, you demand "respect."

Bah.

 

[james77]

Good grief, this keeps getting sillier and sillier.


So the atmosphere isn't dense enough, but vacuum is? This makes no sense.

Bah.

Wait and see what "makes sense" after the experiments are running a while. I have doubts about some of things that have been said. Anyway, that's my belief, enough said, we'll soon see what will or won't materialise with time, won't we?

 

[Vanadium 50]

Wait and see what makes sense after the experiments running a while. And you should stop insulting people too.

Your argument boils down to "the LHC is dangerous because vacuum is denser than atmosphere". That's silly.

If you want to feel insulted because you posted something silly, well, I can't control your feelings.

 

[james77]

Your argument boils down to "the LHC is dangerous because vacuum is denser than atmosphere". That's silly.

I don't think that the fact that the density can strongly increase in the chamber due to ion induced desorption is an irrelevant concern, this can indeed lead to a pressure runaway situation occurring. I don't feel this is a silly observation.

Perhaps what you say is indeed right, I do hope so.

Anyway, I will add nothing futher to this topic (which I sure you'll be glad about)

 

[vanesch]

A terrible idea just occurred to me

In fact, maybe the Tevatron is already producing tons and tons of micro black holes, who already started eating away a few atoms of the earth, and will take a few hundred years to grow to a size which will make them do detectable things ...

Maybe it even started out with the SPS at cern in the 80-ies, but we haven't found out yet...

 

[atyy]

A terrible idea just occurred to me

In fact, maybe the Tevatron is already producing tons and tons of micro black holes, who already started eating away a few atoms of the earth, and will take a few hundred years to grow to a size which will make them do detectable things ...

Maybe it even started out with the SPS at cern in the 80-ies, but we haven't found out yet...

OMG

Yes. It is my favorite. It's called the "many worlds interpretation"

Hopefully there's going to be at least one universe in which the Earth isn't destroyed

 

[jms5631]

I ran across this article today from Physics World during a google search...I think it really puts the origin of the "1 in 50,000,000" odds given by Martin Rees in context, and also their irrelevance to black hole scanarios in the LHC. I only bring it up because the Rees odds are brought up so frequently in LHC discussions, that I think they demand explanation.

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

 

[vanesch]

It occurs to me that a submicroscopic black hole passing through an atom would either swallow nothing at all, or the nucleus as a whole, or one of the electrons. It would thereby acquire a charge, which would quickly be neutralised by its attracting the rest of the mutilated atom. But its trail through the human body might be surrounded by several secondary ionisation events. Thousands of these trails might pass through an inhabitant of Geneva on any given day.

Guess what ? That's already happening: thousands of ionisation trails are crossing your body EVERY SECOND. It's natural radioactivity...

 

[Orion1]

pseudo-scientific...


Administrators, this thread is pseudo-scientific fiction ad nauseam and has devolved into off topic ad hominem, please lock this thread and move it to skepticism and debunking.

Thanks.
[/Color]

 

[humanino]

Administrators, this thread is pseudo-scientific fiction ad nauseam and has devolved into off topic ad hominem, please lock this thread and move it to skepticism and debunking.[/Color]

Please realize that this is an important topic. By locking the thread, you jeopardize the credibility of the scientific community as long as the public community is significantly worried. It is very painful for the scientific community, but it is the only way we can say we "respect the public".

 

[james77]

Please realize that this is an important topic. By locking the thread, you jeopardize the credibility of the scientific community as long as the public community is significantly worried. It is very painful for the scientific community, but it is the only way we can say we "respect the public".

Well, it's not just a case of the so-called Scientific Communities' respect for the general public. The CERN project must show a considerable degree of gratitude and respect to both the policy makers and the public across the EU who have given sizable sums (over the years) of money to this "affair", which is now being monitored extremely closely at such levels. If this project either goes wrong and doesn't deliver any significant or useful results, than there will be very little state or central support given to this type of scientific research in the future.

<It is very painful for the scientific community, but it is the only way we can say we "respect the public> It won't be as painful as getting your funding cut in the future.

Respect is the minimum that members of general public deserve.

 

[mal4mac]

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."

http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/apak/research.html

http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0009204 Risk Anal. 24 (2004) 157-168

Also check out:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7468966.stm

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...

 

[humanino]

Respect is the minimum that members of general public deserve.

And on the public part, realization of what fundamental research has brought to society down to one's daily life is the minimum level of gratitude, even if one does not care about pure knowledge.

I personally do not worry the slightest bit about getting money for my research. It has been difficult, it is difficult, it will be difficult. But in any case, "we must know, we will know".

 

[humanino]

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

Qualified for quantum cryptography or for particle physics ? How many cross-sections did this theorist predict ?

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...

At some level, anybody qualified to give his opinion is interested in LHC. Even people working at the Tevatron for instance. Pick up your phone and call a couple of Russian or Californian physicists if you trust them more than Swiss ones. And come here report on what they told you.

 

[chinatruth]

Please realize that this is an important topic. By locking the thread, you jeopardize the credibility of the scientific community as long as the public community is significantly worried. It is very painful for the scientific community, but it is the only way we can say we "respect the public".

yes you are right. Even in China here many people are worried about LHC. In this thread after reading some thoughts I feel a little better. I regret not being admitted by Physics major...

 

[mal4mac]

Pick up a phone? How 20th century...

Here's some more information on worried *physicists*, who even the establishment think are not crackpots:

Michelangelo L. Mangano, a respected particle physicist who helped discover the top quark in 1995, now spends most days trying to convince people that his new machine won’t destroy the world.

“If it were just crackpots, we could wave them away,” the physicist said in an interview at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French acronym, CERN. “But some are real physicists.”

http://articles.latimes.com/2008/apr/13/science/sci-collider13

 

[humanino]

Pick up a phone? How 20th century...

That will be more efficient than an email, which most likely would be ignored.

Here's some more information on worried *physicists*, who even the establishment think are not crackpots:

That's not the way I understand it. The worried person who needs to be answered are "competent physicists" from the public point of view, not from Mangano's point of view. In the US, as soon as you have a PhD (in any discipline) you are entitled to give your opinion on any matter whatsoever. Take a University professor who spent his entire career building detectors. If this professor claims the CERN is unsafe, journals will report that University professors think so, possibly without making it clear this is an isolated opinion.

Mangano, who we agree is competent, spents his time making it clear CERN is safe, because less competent people considered competent by the public claim it might not be safe.

 

[mal4mac]

Qualified for quantum cryptography or for particle physics?

Qualified enough to get published in a top journal called "Risk Analysis"...

 

[vanesch]

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

It's funny, but there's an entirely adequate answer to that, as far as we consider that the only valuable thing on Earth are the human lives that are right now living on it, and that we don't delve into ethical and philosophical debates about "Gaia" or "future generations" and so on. After all, if Earth is destroyed, those future generations will never exist, and hence will never have to be considered.

So we have to find out what is the acceptable risk of killing 6 billion people. Given that car accidents alone already kill 1.2 million people per year, and that this is considered an acceptable risk, visibly if the risk of killing 6 billion people is acceptable on the same level, it should be of the same magnitude, which means that the probability of it occurring should be about 5000 times smaller (because 5000 times more lives) than the probability of killing 1.2 million people, which is once every year. So the acceptable risk of destroying Earth must be about 1/5000 per year.

Of course, something is not right in this reasoning, and that is that the acceptability of a certain risk is a function of the advantage we get from taking that risk. We accept 1.2 million dead per year because it allows us to travel around. It is not clear that the LHC gives us the same kind of global benefit. But I guess a probability of 1/5000 per year probability of destroying the Earth is in the acceptable ballpark, give or take a few orders of magnitude.

 

[humanino]

Qualified enough to get published in a top journal called "Risk Analysis"...

That is certainly not a top journal in the particle physics community. Not any more important than Time magazine for instance. If it were published in Phys Rev (something) maybe I would take your argument.

 

[mal4mac]

... the only valuable thing on Earth are the human lives that are right now living on it... After all, if Earth is destroyed, those future generations will never exist, and hence will never have to be considered.

I disagree. Future generations are, surely, likely to produce new artistic masterpieces, new physics and so on. And surely even a potential for such advances is worth saving, and must be taken into account. And what about the past? If the Earth is destroyed then all past human culture will be destroyed, all life, and the evolutionary record. Surely all these things are valuable? Or are historians and evolutionists just wasting their time?

Given that car accidents alone already kill 1.2 million people per year, and that this is considered an acceptable risk...

I don't think it's acceptable. One of the reasons I don't have a car...

 

[humanino]

I disagree. Future generations are, surely, likely to produce new artistic masterpieces, new physics and so on. And surely even a potential for such advances is worth saving, and must be taken into account. And what about the past? If the Earth is destroyed then all past human culture will be destroyed, all life, and the evolutionary record. Surely all these things are valuable? Or are historians and evolutionists just wasting their time?

You don't understand the logical argument. Vanesch's logical argument is perfectly valid. I would even add to it : "unless we keep on doing fundamental research, we are certain to never be able to leave this planet, hence ultimately disappear".

I don't think it's acceptable. One of the reasons I don't have a car...

But then your opinion is clearly irrelevant, in the mathematical sense since it is completely negligible, or to put in another way, the set of people who think humans should give up cars can be given (in more than one manner) a null measure in the set of all humans.

 

[mal4mac]

That is certainly not a top journal in the particle physics community. Not any more important than Time magazine for instance. If it were published in Phys Rev (something) maybe I would take your argument.

This is an outrageous dismissal of another speciality.

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...

 

[humanino]

This is an outrageous dismissal of another speciality.

Sorry but I also don't care that Nature does not publish so much of fundamental physics. The only reason they don't is because we can't provide with beautiful color pictures.

This is outraging you but unfortunately it's true. You, yourself, can easily publish a paper claiming that LHC is dangerous. Just pick up a local newspaper. Why should the physics community at large care ? The paper you referred us to has no quotation. Strange for such an important paper don't you think ?

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...

Yet another way to see it, there is no such thing as bad publicity.

Finally, it does not matter to me that the UK is mocking physicists : I'm french More seriously, the attempt to sue CERN has been dismissed by Europe. What do you have to say about that ?

 

[vanesch]

I disagree. Future generations are, surely, likely to produce new artistic masterpieces, new physics and so on. And surely even a potential for such advances is worth saving, and must be taken into account. And what about the past? If the Earth is destroyed then all past human culture will be destroyed, all life, and the evolutionary record. Surely all these things are valuable? Or are historians and evolutionists just wasting their time?



I don't think it's acceptable. One of the reasons I don't have a car...

Ok, I think I'll start a thread in the philosophy forum on this thing:
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?p=1860805#post1860805

 

[cristo]

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...

Here's what everyone's favourite British newspaper has to say: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1052354/Are-going-die-Wednesday.html

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 (and this is not the worst by a long way-- I was speaking to my mum the other day and she was asking me what I thought about CERN "creating new universes".)

 

[humanino]

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.