Still worried that the Large Hadron Collider will create a black hole that will destroy the Earth when it’s finally switched on this summer?
Um, well, you may have a point.
Three physicists have reexamined the math surrounding the creation of microscopic black holes in the Switzerland-based LHC, the world’s largest particle collider, and determined that they won’t simply evaporate in a millisecond as had previously been predicted.
Rather, Roberto Casadio of the University of Bologna in Italy and Sergio Fabi and Benjamin Harms of the University of Alabama say mini black holes could exist for much longer — perhaps even more than a second, a relative eternity in particle colliders, where most objects decay much faster.
Under such long-lived conditions, it becomes a race between how fast a black hole can decay — and how fast it can gobble up matter to grow bigger and prevent itself from decaying.
I’m glad we don’t live directly on the other side of Europe. If the black hole does fall through the earth I expect it will be gobbling up the Pacfic Ocean as it exits the other side. Might even help the US by eating up a lot of Pacific Ocean and creating valuable new beachfront property on the West Coast. Thanks European scientists!
Interesting…I wonder what the effect would be if it does. Would it be enough to swallow the planet, or just take out the detector assembly? And what size would the event horizon be? I should probably read the paper…FOX says that it’s only 8 pages.
[HIJACK]
I know Fox News is maligned by many, but haven’t read anything there before…
This is a news article from a professional news organization, or a teens attempt at mimicing the Onion?
And does it take 45+ seconds for their pages to load for everyone?
Oh no, not again… Anyway, the math has been gone over, examined and re-examined, and even if the black holes that could be produced at the energy levels the LHC operates at didn’t decay at all, they’d become a danger no earlier than in a couple of thousand years, and that’s using the very, very worst case assumptions about the exact geometry of space-time. The thing is, whatever will be created there would be much smaller than even a proton, and it’s not even sure if it could ever actually swallow so much as an elementary particle.
Now, now. Sacrifices must be made to advance the realm of human knowledge. And we’re going big time, here! No more volcano sacrifices, we’re dumping entire states into black holes!
Then there’s the little matter (Ha! I kill me) of the billions of years of cosmic ray bombardment the Earth has endured which exceeds in both quantity and intensity anything produced by the LHC by a factor of billions without ever once having produced an Earth-swallowing black hole.
Anyway, the math has been gone over, examined and re-examined, and even if the black holes that could be produced at the energy levels the LHC operates at didn’t decay at all, they’d become a danger no earlier than in a couple of thousand years, and that’s using the very, very worst case assumptions about the exact geometry of space-time. The thing is, whatever will be created there would be much smaller than even a proton, and it’s not even sure if it could ever actually swallow so much as an elementary particle.