A year or two ago I remember seeing reports that experiments at a Long Island university to research the Higgs Boson could create a miniature black hole which would end up destroying the Earth and eventually our solar system.
Where did this idea come from? Wouldn’t the black hole created by the experiment be so small that its existence would be remarkably brief before it evaporated? Is there really a statistical probability that this would occur as a result of experimentation?
We don’t posses the ability to create a black hole, inadvertantly or otherwise.
It’s true that a black hole evaporates, as shown by Stephen Hawking. But it doesn’t flicker out like a candle when it reaches the end of its cycle. It explodes violently, in a burst of gamma radiation. So even if its existance is very brief, the surrounding environment would be severely affected.
On a final note, even a very tiny black hole requires eons to evaporate completely.
Actually, the story is about the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at The Brookhaven National Laboratory. The experiments were/are to be of the highest energy achieved in a particle collider. The fear was that either (1) particles would be so compressed that they would form a singularity and then begin to suck up all the surrounding matter until the whole Earth was gone or (2) the collision would create particles of “strange matter” which would convert normal matter around it into strange matter…another chain reaction that would destroy the Earth. I seem to recall worse fears (like creating a new Big Bang that destroys the universe) but don’t quote me on that.
Anyway, there was supposedly a debate by top physicists and they decided to proceed with the experiments because (1) the odds of catastrophe were near-impossible and (2) nothing would probably happen because even higher energy collisions happen all the time in the upper atmosphere when high-energy cosmic rays hit the atmosphere (something that has been happening for all of Earth’s history and no black holes or strange matter have happened yet).
That’s last I heard. I assume the experiments are underway although I have not heard about the results.
There were lots of news articles on the web…they’re probably still there. check google search…here’s some…
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/tech/FredMoody/moody990914.html
lots more to be found…
We may be able to soon, according to an article in the New York Times. Here’s the abstract.
Supposedly CERN’s upcoming Large Hadron Collider will be able to create black holes.
Arjuna34
To add to what Phobos has already said, this link gives a summary of the official conclusions as to the risks. As it makes clear, aside from black holes and strangelets, they also considered the possibility that the collider might tip the universe into another vacuum state. Since this is tied up with symmetry breaking and hence Higgs particles, this may be why heptapod remembered them in this context.
And as an aside, it may have concerned people with a casual knowledge of the subject that experiments like RHIC are investigating states of matter very like those found at the centre of neutron stars. After all, aren’t neutron stars almost black holes ? If you can compress stuff to this density, are you sure you aren’t going to go a bit too far and compress it down to a black hole ?
Except that what’s important in forming a stellar mass black hole is not that the density is this, it’s that there’s lots of mass at this density. If you call the density of a black hole the density of matter you have to cram into what’s going to be the black hole, then the density is inversely proportional to the mass of the hole produced. The amounts of matter being slammed together at RHIC are roughly the mass of a proton. Stars are about 57 orders of magnitudes more massive than this. The density required to form a black hole with the same mass as a proton is thus 114 orders of magnitude greater than neutron star density. That’s the RHIC safety margin as far as accidently creating black holes goes.
Going the other way, provided you have the matter to hand and some way of shifting it around, the density of a galactic mass black hole is easy to attain.
If only …
I think we need to keep these Higgs Bosons out of the hands of known terrorist groups.
Just think what they could do. We must keep all of our supercolliders safe!
I’m just a caveman, on anti-anxiety medication for panic attacks and depression.
So clear this up for me, since I can just barely grasp what y’all are talking about.
Should I worry about this or not?
jarbaby
The answer is No, because:
A) The top physicists decided that the risk is negligible, and we can always trust our scientists. 
B) If the universe is coming to an end, and you can’t stop it, then why waste the effort to worry about it? This reminds me of that great song The Last Day of Pompeii (I’m paraphrasing from memory): “if I had known, I would’ve gotten a new life…heck, I would’ve gotten a new wife!”
No. The bottomline is that mankind’s ability to do weird stuff with, well, stuff is pitiful compared to what the universe does as a matter of course. There are more important things to lose sleep over.
Mankind is currently nowhere near being able to produce a black hole, by any means, and will probably not have the ability in the lifetimes of any of our great grandchildren. It’s estimated that an accelerator capable of doing such things would need to be the size of the entire solar system, or so. Let’s set that aside for a moment, though, and suppose that some hyper-high energy particle accelerator did, in fact, create a tiny black hole. What would happen? Well, the smaller a black hole is, the faster it would evaporate, and one of the size we’re talking about would evaporate completely about as close to instantaneously as you’re likely to find in physics. Wouldn’t that be a huge explosion? No, because bizarre though black holes may be, they do still obey the conservation of energy. The energy you get out of the black hole when it decays is exactly equal to the energy you put into it when it was created. It would be no worse an explosion than you might expect if something in the lab just plain broke.
Sooner or later, the laws of probability will kick in and I’ll be right about something.
Thanks for the info, Chronos.
That said, something weird is happening at Brookhaven. How else could you explain Joey Buttofuco and the Baldwin brothers?