When I was a boy I was very curious. I wanted to know what this stuff was that made things happen and I knew enough that if I stuck a nail into an electrical socket I would find out. I did have experience with electric fences, though unpleasant, gave me weird feelings. Well I found out, I survived, and fortunately 220 sockets were not accessible to me during that time of my life.
Well, next May, scientists are going to start experimenting with the new Hadron Collider
I read somewhere elso that temperatures will exceed that of the sun.
I don’t see any tangible benefit to mankind other than gaining knowledge. Is that good enough to put the globe at risk even if the majority of scientists say the risk is “extremely small”?
This seems like a sensible argument. Surely if the Universe were fragile enough to be destroyed by a a high-energy particle collision, none of us would be around to worry about it by now.
Is this really fair? You admit to getting “weird feelings” from your amateur electrical experiments, and yet you would deny scientists the opportunity to enjoy a really large hadron. Honestly, who among us hasn’t wished for a larger, more impressive hadron? Such a desire is perfectly natural. Despite what the nuns may have told you, the Universe will not end if you play with your hadron. If only more of us could share the enthusiastic attitude of the Large Hadron Collider team, with their exuberant motto prominently displayed on T-shirts and bumper stickers: “I’ve Got a Hadron for Science!”
I’m pretty sure scientists have already created such temperatures on Earth before. Just don’t touch it while it’s running, or you may burn your hadron.
They called me mad! Mad! They laughed at my theories!! But when I destroy the Earth or even the entire Universe, they won’t laugh then!!! BWAAAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Well Ican see that my concerns for the safety of life on planet earth is of no concern to this community. On the one hand I’m just an undereducated isolated voice in the SDMB community that doesn’t quite trust the upper echelons of powerful self interest groups whether they be scientists/universities or scientists/corporations.
The best assurance I’m given is that the risk of black holes is very small. More succinctly, I’m not concerned with black holes on earth. What I am concerned with is one black hole. Period.
More than anything I’m perplexed at the perceived risk benefit ratio. The scientists have acknowledged risk. The upside is the verification of Higgs bosun. Or not. Greedy men can be blinded by the prospect of gold. Scientists can be blinded by the prospect of revelations.
All of our current understanding gives us a vanishingly small chance for a microscopic black hole to form for all of a millionth of a second affecting nothing. We also understand that the universe has been doing these things at a MUCH grander scale for 13.7 billion years and it’s still here.
Microscopic or not, billionth of a second or not, the nature of a black hole is defined by the accretion of matter the gravity of which is so intense to include photons as well. Think about it. In your millionth of a second, how many photons can a black hole absorb? And what just what terminates the appetite of a black hole? Especially after a millionth of a second? Do we have any evidence of a terminated black hole? That just might reassure me.
Yes, but the influence of black holes is remote, very remote. Fortunately. So is the sun to a lesser degree. Fortunately. Lets keep it that way.
Are you kidding? The problem is that I don’t know and I’m expected to accept the word of a segment of society with an agenda (that I can understand) reminiscent of powerful tobacco companies, under oath, that will tell you that cigarrettes are not adictive.
Spare us your sanctimonious martyr routine unless you can provide a mechanism to create long living mini-back holes with a “diameter” far below the Planck length through energies orders of magnitude below cosmic ray / particle interactions in our atmosphere.
Honestly what exactly do you think a black hole does? It’s simply a very dense piece of matter that won’t allow anything crossing its event horizon to return. But you have to actually cross the horizon for it to be a problem. Think of it this way, your fridge magnet is strong enough to hold up a shopping list despite5.9e10[sup]24[/sup]kgs worth of planet trying to pull it down.
Who told you that there might be a small risk? That same segment of society you then claim has an agenda in dismissing the possibility.
Who’s to say the black hole won’t grow far too fast in that millionth of a second, and gobble up the earth? The same ‘segment of society’ that postulated the existence of black holes to begin with! If you’re so ready to believe that ‘segment of society’ when they hypothesise the existence of black holes, why do you DISbelieve them when they discount the possibility of an earth-gobbling black hole? You can’t have your cake and eat it. Physics is one big package. You seem to want to cherry-pick the components of existence. I’ll have a super-double deluxe black hole to go, but please hold the Hawking evaporation? It doesn’t work that way.
The black hole being trumpeted as the bringer of universal doom is smaller than any other massive particle in all but mass. In mass, it is exactly twice as massive as a single proton. You are surrounded by many trillions of objects far more massive than this theoretical black hole. Have you fallen into any of them?
On a side note, I was wondering if perhaps dark matter is simply the vast number of nano black holes created by cosmic ray collisions over billions of years. The particles drift around in space, creating gravitational “anomalies” and are pretty much undetectable by any other means. As galaxies move around by light pressure, and impacts from waves of gas and such, the itty bitty black holes remain behind, orbiting around each other, and accreting very slowly because of their small radius, and consequently low frequency of collision with each other, and with other normal matter. (Which idea necessarily assumes Hawking radiation doesn’t happen, of course.)
