According to this article, a big funky machine is gonna make baby black holes or somesuch. Bottom line, how likely is a bad SciFi channel apocalypse? :eek:
According to the article:
While I’m not sure the grammar is correct, the sentiment is comforting, sort of.
From the article:
Um… show your workings, Poindexter.
That is possibly the least reassuring thing I’ve ever read in a news article. They always say that the chances of destroying the planet are extremely low, and you know what? Earth always ends up on the brink of destruction. Have these people never scene a movie on the SciFi channel?
Have you ever wondered why we have not been contacted by advanced civilizations out in space. The reason is that as soon as a civilization gets to the complexity of Science knowledge necessary to experiment with particle accelerators, they always make the mistake of trying to recreate mini big-bangs. Then BOOM they blow up their planet, and their civilization is no more. At least the planetry debris is full of hardy bacteria that dirft through space until they land on another planet in which they can thrive eventually evolving into inteligent beings that can blow themselves up. Thus is the beauty of nature 
Well, first off, the “Baby Bangs” are going to be created in Europe, in France and possibly Switzerland, not New Zealand.
Short answer: no, you don’t have to worry about black holes devouring you and everything you hold dear. What the LHC (the big funky machine mentioned) is going to be doing is taking protons and anti-protons and smashing them together at phenomenally high energies. But while these energies are pretty darn high by particle-collider standards, they’re pretty mundane by the standards of nature; thousands of cosmic rays (protons and other particles sent hurtling through space by supernovas) with similar or greater energies collide with the Earth’s atmosphere every year. And the Earth is still here.
Even if black holes are created in such a process, they’re supposed to evaporate very quickly; there’s a theoretical mechanism for this called “Hawking radiation”, which basically says that black holes emit particles due to quantum-mechanical effects. For a star-sized black hole, this emission is supposed to be tiny (and we’ve never observed it directly); but for a tiny black hole such as would be created in a particle collider, this emission would be much larger, and the black hole would evaporate post-haste.
It should also be noted that as far as currently-accepted models of physics go, the LHC won’t produce any black holes. Any black-hole production would be a sign of “new physics” that isn’t predicted by any of the well-established laws of physics. This would be very exciting, of course, and would give the theorists something solid to build their theories around, but it’s not really expected, per se.
We went through this black hole nonsense last year with the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider
The BBC article: Lab fireball ‘may be black hole’
There’s a history for this scare:
Doomsday Fears at RHIC
Remember folks, next August Mars will be closer to Earth than ever before, and appear as large as the moon in the night time sky. NOT!
It’s to be created near Geneva, not in New Zealand; we already have a miniature black hole here: it’s called Wellington.*
*Disclaimer: Wellington is actually a very nice place.
That was my thought, except I thought it was the least reassuring thing I’ve ever read anywhere, ever. Plus they didn’t discuss the risk of a superscientist intentionally destroying the planet with this thing.
This sort of doomsday nonsense seems to reoccur with each new high-energy experiment. I think the blame partially rests on scientists trying to make their work sound more exciting to the general public, and partially on the media for focusing on what will sell the most papers rather than what’s grounded in reality.
So basically, he said “that’s the stupidest thing I ever heard” (only in numbers) and they devoted a sixth of their article to it (4 out of 24 sentences).
Of course, if he hadn’t been going on about “mini-big bangs” . . . . The key point that’s getting glossed over is that there’s a difference between energy and energy density. In fairness, Dr. Cox made this point, but apparently not forcefully enough to get through to the people writing the article.
So the actual amount of energy they’re using is relatively mundane (when’s the last time an aircraft carrier destroyed the earth?), but what’s interesting is when you put it into subatomic particles, they can form higher energy subatomic particles that you don’t normally see. Like the Higgs boson, which the article completely ignores to focus on far more speculative ideas about forming mini-black holes or probing other dimensions.
I guess the headline “new experiment may help us understand why particles have mass” wasn’t sexy enough.
That article does an admirable job explaining (1) why these fears are unfounded, and (2) where these ideas come from in the first place. (And it cites sources!) And even though it’s about RHIC, it’s pretty much all relevant to the LHC as well, so for anyone still concerned about this stuff I’d recommend giving it a read.
Thanks for the link! 
Well, that article claims their atomic collisions would have the energy of a mosquito hitting a windshield, which is a lot less than the energy of an oil tanker described in the new experiment info.
Has anyone got the numbers for the new CERN experiment? Will it be much more powerful than the most powerful Cosmic rays?
The whole apparatus uses energy comparable to a large ship. Most of that is wasted, though, and only a small amount acctually ends up in the collisions, each of which has more like a mosquito worth of energy.
I don’t know exact numbers for the LHC specifically, but current particle accelerators are edging up into the TeV range-- That’s tera-electron volts. The most energetic cosmic ray ever observed, the Oh-My-God Particle, had an energy of about 300 million TeV. As usual, our puny little tinkerings have nothing on what nature has already done. And cosmic rays haven’t produced a black hole that’s eaten the Earth yet.
Thanks chronos, I couldn’t beleive the article quote
“These beams will have the kinetic energy of an aircraft carrier slammed into the size of a zero on a 20p piece,”
(though the kinetic energy of an Aircraft carrier could be 0 or any other value depending on its speed relative to the observer)
I’ll wait till we get close to 10^20 eV before worrying then.
I’m not seeing that, there… 1 TeV is 10[sup]12[/sup] eV. They’re talking 14 TeV for protons (which is only about 5 TeV per quark, which is more relevant), and even for lead nuclei (with many more quarks), they’re only looking to get 1150 TeV, or about 10[sup]15[/sup] eV.
Sorry my math was wrong I meant 10^15 eV for the lead nuclei experiment.
The SNS in east Tennessee is far bigger and higher power for a different purpose.
I’m far more worried regarding the clash of civilizations on the sociological front.
You worry over the “Baby Bang” in NZ. I’ll worry about the clash of civilizations. 