Oh, by the way, the black hole threat from that particle collider is greater than thought

keep the change on January 27, 2009 at 2:32 PM
This just shows once again that what scientists say is true, may not necessarily be true. What is true on Monday, is not necessarily true on Tuesday. Which is fine. Except if you do dangerous things on Tuesday based on what you thought was true on Monday.

Nonetheless, the scientists at the collider will do their experiments come hell or high water. For them, this is like crack cocaine.

1. Reading Fox News is not a good way to determine what might or might not happen in particle physics.

2. The researchers are Italian. Similar to 1. (Kidding! Don’t kill me, Italian colleagues!)

3. Math warning! The energy available to create a black hole at the LHC totals 14 TeV per interaction. That means that a black hole with a mass of 2.5E-20 grams could be created. What kind of area of influence would that be? (Schwartzchild radius) About 4E-50 m. Compared to a proton (2E-15 m) and an electron (1.5E-15 m) — that’s a hundred million billion billion billion times smaller than an electron.

Worse, its gravitational pull would be indescribably feeble. It couldn’t “suck” anything in without running straight into it.

Since the space inside and between atoms is vast nothingness for the most part, I’d be surprised if the black hole at that size, with nothing to guide it, encountered ANYTHING that it could eat within a second, much less enough to counter its evaporation.

The only real problem with the 1 sec. problem for me is that it makes detection of decay products impossible, since it’s probably left the detector far behind, and because we are used to things happening in 10E-24 seconds.

OK. So — don’t worry.

Prufrock on January 27, 2009 at 3:39 PM