Zero. These black holes are too small to absorb any photons (or anything else) before the hole evaporates.
The black hole emits Hawking radiation, losing mass until there is none left. And, the smaller the hole, the quicker it disappears. These super-small black holes die very quickly.
The short lifespan of the black hole means it has little time to absorb anything before it dies.
No direct evidence exists, that’s why they’re building the Collider. However, there is a lot of indirect evidence indicating we know what will happen with confidence.
It is worth perhaps mentioning again that every second, cosmic rays collide with particles in the Earth’s upper atmosphere with more energy by a few orders of magnitude than the LHC can generate.
So the reason the LHC is not actually a worry is because it’s not even close to the most energetic particle effects already happening within a hundred miles of you.
My adviser is actually one of the main physicists trying to create these black holes. While I myself am not yet involved in this research (I am working on a more mundane project) it is certainly something I am interested in and might potentially get involved in down the road. Anyway, since the cosmic ray argument has already been given to refute the OP’s fears, I thought I just might point everyone interested to this link for a more scientific explanation of the issue:
How do we know that Hawking radiation really happens? From what I’ve read, there a problem in that the calculations behind the idea depend on frequencies that are beyond the Planck scale. If we don’t understand what happens at that scale, isn’t it all just conjecture?
The argument I read was that these collisions are occurring with much greater momentum than the ones that would happen in a collider, and therefore are more safe (not sure why, but that was the explanation.) Supposedly the collisions in the Hadron Collider won’t have the same momentum, so they are potentially destructive. If someone can address that, please do so.
Also, there’s riker’s argument, which is the other main objection that has been raised to the collider.
Another factor to consider is that gravitation decreases as the square of the distance between the affected bodies, and the absolute value of the masses involved matters, too. So a quantum black hole will have a hugely intense gravitation field. But it’s also a terribly small one, too. That is not going to have a noticeble effect outside of a few angstroms from the center of the black hole.
Remember, we’re talking about sub-atomic particles, here. Even if every collision produces a black hole (which is a complete impossibility, AIUI) they’re still going to be black holes with the mass of less than a Helium atom. The Schwartzshield radius, that is the distance from a point source with that mass beyond which light cannot escape, will be so small that AIUI a black hole of that mass could pass through a DNA molecule without having anything pass through it’s Schwarzshield radius. (Note: I’m not saying that the DNA molecule would be unaffected: among other things, I’d have to posit a speed for this passage before I could even begin to calculate other possible effects. And I’m not sure I have the math necessary to make the calculations anyways. My gut reaction is that the molecule would have at least some ionization happen, but that’s just a gut feeling.)
As for riker1384’s concern - IANAHEP, just a former radsponge. My understanding, though, is that so-called Hawking radiation is simply an application of the mathematics of pair production for photon attenuation. And while the math describing that phenomenon is pretty abstruse, we know that happens.
It sorta seems like something (the Big Comet?) or someone (Al Gore using too much energy and pushing AGW over the tipping point?) is going to finish off earth. Pick your Cause and champion it. The LHC has not gotten much traction b/c of reasons you can read on past threads. I myself plan to sue those bastards like there is no tomorrow if they end up blowing up the earth.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but creating a black hole type object out of a collision of a few sub-atomic particles is not going to create an object with substantially greater gravitational attraction than the sum of those parts, right?
In others words, if I caused a molecule of water to compress down to a black hole’s density, the gravitational attraction is still about a molecules worth…
A black hole grows only when other matter gets stuck to it. With black holes the size of an atom, it’s not going to suck much up before it decays.
I think you’re right. The end product’s rest mass is probably going to be more than the total rest mass of the parts, cause they were travelling at very high speed when they collided, but even so we’re still talking about subatomic scales.
Black holes are very misunderstood objects. A black hole doesn’t “suck” anything anymore than the Earth “sucks” you off the roof when you lose your balance. It’s just a mass that has gravity. What makes a black hole unique is density. Black holes are incredibly dense (maybe infinitely so) so it does weird things to space when you get close enough to it. But it’s still just gravity; if the sun were to become a black hole, the planets would continue along their orbits just fine as long as the sun’s mass were the same. To get a black hole, you simply have to cram a bunch of mass into a tiny volume (for a sense of scale, a black hole with the mass of the Earth would be about the size of a marble). Shooting things at each other at high speeds is one way to do that.
Weren’t black holes thought to have to evaporate somehow (Hawking radiation or not) due to thermodynamic arguments? A black hole is supposedly an object that has very little entropy, as it can be summed up in just 3 simple terms: mass, charge, and spin. Given that all mass in the universe will eventually become black holes or be sucked into one, it seems contrary to the 2nd law to have everything in the universe become low-entropy objects. So these things can’t be permanent, they gotta evaporate somehow (even it it takes a billion trillion years) and release their energy into the universe where once again many different states are available.
With each generation of stars, there’s slightly less matter to go around to make new ones. Some mass is converted to heat energy, and with supernovae, some mass is made into black holes. A long, long, long time from now, like billions of trillions of years, matter will be too sparse to form new stars, so it’ll just float around as dust, eventually falling into the first black hole it comes across.
Why are scientists in such a rush to get these answers? How does getting the knowledge today help humanity more than getting the knowledge tomorrow?
For example, the Hubble telescope costs billions of dollars. Its successor, the Webb telescope will cost less and do more. Compared to cosmic timescales, does taking crappier pictures a few years earlier really justify that expenditure?
Presumably, particle accelerators get better and cheaper over time. Why not wait a few years and get the same answers for half the price? Or wait a bit longer and do the experiment on the moon so no worries if something unexpected happens?