Will CERN make black holes that will consume the Earth?

[Lancer]

http://www.lhcfacts.org/

Over 60% of poll responants believe it isn't worth the risk. What about Poly folks? Read up and vote.

[Dinner]

There has already been multiple threads on this.

[Lancer]

I would think that when discussing the impending end of the world that multiple threads isn't that big a deal. Besides, this one has a poll.

[Lancer]

If I don't get a vote on whether a machine that could potentially kill me is turned on, well I don't have to buy Hershey chocolate, or Swiss watches or cheese. Plus, I'm not going to deposit any $ in Swiss banks either.

[Perfection]

Re: Will CERN make black holes that will consume the Earth?

Originally posted by Lancer

http://www.lhcfacts.org/

Over 60% of poll responants believe it isn't worth the risk. What about Poly folks? Read up and vote.

Yes, but those 60% are AOL users.

[Lancer]

What worries me is that I got a pal with the world's worst luck. He got engaged to my wife's cousin over 9 months ago and has been going through the process of bringing her over ever since, a process that took Dolores and I just over 3 months. Anything that could go wrong did, but that's all behind them now, she's been approved at the embasy in Manila. Now its just a matter of waiting on a courier to bring her visa over and thats just about overdue. I mean its been a disaster from the word go, one thing after another.


So I figure she's going to get off the plane in Portland and just before they get into each others arms the Swiss are going to destroy the world.

If you knew him, a really decent guy but cursed, you would be worried too.

[Kuciwalker]

That just tells us that over 60% of poll respondents don't know any physics. The answer is, no CERN will not.

[onodera]

LHC

[tinyp3nis]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
That just tells us that over 60% of poll respondents don't know any physics. The answer is, no CERN will not.

You know enough physics to know the answer? I figured almost all of the 40% form their opinion by listening to expert opinion and taking it as is, not by having expert opinion themselves.

[Kuciwalker]

You barely need any physics to understand why this won't destroy the Earth.

edit: explanation in a second

The way high-energy physicists discover anything new is through (surprise) throwing ever larger gobs over energy together and seeing if they observe any new particles. That's the point of a particle accelerator - make your particles go really ****ing fast and they have a ton of energy. LHC has enough energy that, if certain models are right, it will produce micro black holes. This is how we confirm or deny the validity of those models. However, these energies are on the same order as those of cosmic rays, which bombard the Earth's atmosphere all the time. Which means, if LHC will generate a micro black hole, then micro black holes are being generated constantly in the upper atmosphere. The world hasn't ended yet. Therefore, micro black holes, if they exist, wouldn't destroy the world.

[Lancer]

Yet there are alot of people who know physics who are concerned which you would know if you had followed the link.

Here, some of their mumbo jumbo for you...

US District Court of Hawaii »Collider Incidents
Existing colliders are many times less powerful than the Large Hadron Collider. And most physicists think that the much lower power existing head-on particle colliders have not created micro black holes. However there have been some incidents that hint that science may be close to creating micro black holes even with less powerful colliders, and papers published by MIT physicists argue that bosenova implosions of ultra-cold Bose-Einstein Condensates with Attractive Interactions could result in micro black holes of infinite density. However at least one author of one of those papers argues that the papers may be misleading. Our initial investigation indicates that the papers do appear to predict “real micro black holes”.

RHIC Fireball
For example, Horatiu Nastase of Brown University writes: “We argue that the fireball observed at RHIC is (the analog of) a dual black hole.” The RHIC fireball as a dual black hole by Horatiu Nastase: “… dual to gravitational interaction inside the black hole, deconfining quarks and gluons…”, “… core of the fireball is the pion field soliton=black hole interior…”, “… Most likely there will be no singularity for this black hole….”

The RHIC fireball is not believed to be a true micro black hole, but only the pre-cursor to, or the analog of a micro black hole. Creation of a true micro black hole has been predicted based on some theories to require at least 1 Tev of highly focused energy such as can be achieved with head-on collisions generated by the Large Hadron Collider.

Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) Bosenova Implosion
Nobel laureate Dr. Eric A. Cornell, who leads Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) research at the University of Colorado, wrote of the possibility of stable micro black hole creation as an explanation for missing atoms after an unexpected BEC bosenova implosion at the university of Colorado using naturally attractive Rb85 atoms, “probably not a black hole, more likely…“, though Dr. Cornell doesn’t think a micro black hole was created by one of his experiments, and he explains that the term “probably not” was merely a diplomatic response to that suggestion, and not meant to indicate a belief that micro black hole creation was plausible. Dr. Carl E. Wieman, who also shares the 2001 Nobel prize for Physics writes “I can state ABSOLUTELY CATEGORICALLY that it is totally inconceivable that a black hole could be produced by these phenomena.” However physicists at MIT published papers that appear to suggest (paraphrase) “probably a black hole“.

A difference of opinion appears to exist between the University of Colorado team and physics researcher’s at MIT including Masahito Ueda and Kerson Huang who conduct similar research, based on my understanding of related published material on the subject and communications with some of the physicists involved.

The unexplained Bosenova implosion of Bose-Einstein Condensate with attractive interactions involved a “super atom” at 3 nk (3 billionths of a degree above absolute zero) containing approximately 16,000 naturally attracting Rb85 atoms that were induced to repel to make the condensate stable. From the Wikipedia article on the subject:

When the scientists raised the magnetic field strength still further, the condensate suddenly reverted back to attraction, imploded and shrank beyond detection, and then exploded, blowing off about two-thirds of its 10,000 or so atoms. About half of the atoms in the condensate seemed to have disappeared from the experiment altogether, not being seen either in the cold remnant or the expanding gas cloud.

These atoms were compressed to a single giant atom while mutually repelling each other, and when the atoms were subsequently induced to attract to each other, the BEC unexpectedly imploded beyond detection then exploded and after the explosion thousands of atoms could not be accounted for, they unexpectedly and mysteriously vanished. BOSE-EINSTEIN CONDENSATION IN A DILUTE GAS; THE FIRST 70 YEARS AND SOME RECENT EXPERIMENTS

This incident was named bosenova because of its similarity to a “core collapse supernova”.

“However, as yet there is no clear explanation of the energy and anisotropy of the atoms in the explosion, the fraction of vanished atoms, and the size of the cold remnant. One of the more puzzling aspects is that the cold remnant can be far larger than the condensate stability condition that determines the collapse point would seem to allow “

“The atoms that seem to have disappeared almost certainly still exist in some form, just not in a form that could be detected in that experiment. Two likely possibilities are that they formed molecules consisting of two bonded rubidium atoms, or that they somehow received enough energy to fly away fast enough that they left the observation region before they could be observed. They may also have undergone nuclear fusion.”

For a good start understanding what a Bose-Einstein Condensate is, I recommend Dr. Cornell’s high quality web site written in lay person’s terms with several interactive graphics describing Boes-Einstein Condensates

I found the following short article by Science@NASA to be very interesting. The article My Pet Neutron Star speaks of the desire of physicists to create micro black holes in the laboratory and how this might be accomplished.

Neutron stars and their cousins, white dwarfs and black holes, are extreme forms of matter that many scientists would love to tinker with — if only they could get one in their lab. But how? Researchers experimenting with a new form of matter called Bose-Einstein condensates may have found a way.

Is it plausible to believe that bosenova implosions from Bose-Einstein Condensates with attractive interactions might theoretically create the same type of micro black holes that some theories predict might be caused by head-on particle collisions above 1 Tev, and therefore the safety discussion with respect to creation of micro black holes in head-on colliders, which is currently being debated, might also relate to some forms of BEC experimentation? Papers published by the MIT team appear to indicate this.

Have any of these experiments shown any evidence that might tend to support or debunk Hawking Radiation theory? Unknown. Such experimental evidence might be of extreme interest as it relates to the current Safety debate concerning the Large Hadron Collider and predictions that the LHC might create micro black holes.

JTankers

Additional References Added June 9, 2008:

What Studies tend to predict that Micro-Black Holes might plausibly be formed from Bose-Einstein Condensate Bosenova Implosions?

Instability of a Bose-Einstein Condensate with Attractive Interaction by Antonios Eleftheriou and Kerson Huang, Department of Physics and Center for Theoretical Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA (February 1, 2008)
“…local collapse to a state of infinite density.”
“We verify that the picture presented by Ueda and Huang is correct. For N > Nc , a “black-hole” does appear at the center of the trap”

Physicists researchers at MIT appear to suggest that laboratory created Bose-Einstein Condensate Bosenova implosions might result in the creation of micro black holes:

Cold Trapped Atoms: A Mesoscopic System by Kerson Huang, Department of Physics and Center for Theoretical Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT-CTP#3048
“A black hole opens up at the center, …density fluctuations becomes infinite“
“The density in the black hole shoots up as time goes on, fed by waves of implosion“

Physicists researchers at MIT appear to suggest that laboratory created Bose-Einstein Condensate Bosenova implosions might result in the creation of micro black holes:

Instability of a Bose-Einstein condensate with an attractive interaction by Department of Physics and Center for Theoretical Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139
“results are consistent with the formation of a “black hole” of infinite density fluctuations, as predicted by Ueda and Huang”

Theories proposed by Los Alamos Researchers indicate that black holes might contain a new form of matter that is less than infinitely dense, and may actually be similar to Bose-Einstein condensate matter.

Los Alamos researcher says ‘black holes’ aren’t holes at all by James E. Rickman, elvis@lanl.gov, (505) 665-9203, LOS ALAMOS, N.M., April 21, 2002
“Mottola and Pawel suggest that while some degree of collapsing does take place in a dying star, the collapse proceeds only to a certain point. At that point, the intense gravity of the dying star transforms the star’s matter into an entirely new phase. Mottolla describes this phase as similar to a Bose-Einstein condensate, a phase of matter recently observed in a laboratory setting and the subject of scientific excitement in the past few years. “



I had cut off a fair amount of mumbo jumbo because there was just too much of it for Poly. Plus, this is just one page of it, there are many.

[Lancer]

There seems to me to be a 'flip the switch and see what happens' mentality to this whole thing. The people who have invested so much into it just BS away anyone saying, 'hold on, lets think what might happen before we flip the switch.'

[Kuciwalker]

Uh.

None of that says that a micro black hole would destroy the Earth. In fact, many of them, if true, prove that a micro black hole would not, by virtue of the fact that we've already created them.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Lancer
There seems to me to be a 'flip the switch and see what happens' mentality to this whole thing. The people who have invested so much into it just BS away anyone saying, 'hold on, lets think what might happen before we flip the switch.'

Jesus Christ, did you even read what I wrote?

[Lancer]

Didn't say that it wouldn't either. My point is, once you flip it on and it destroys the world any chance of figuring out if its going to destroy the world when you flip it on is gone.