Black-Hole Spawning Collider! Kewl!

[3113]

Now that's the right way to end the planet! Create a black hole!

GENEVA — Michelangelo L. Mangano, a respected particle physicist who helped discover the top quark in 1995, now spends most days trying to convince people that his new machine won't destroy the world. "If it were just crackpots, we could wave them away," the physicist said in an interview at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French acronym, CERN. "But some are real physicists."

What the critics are in such a lather about is the $8-billion Large Hadron Collider, a massive assemblage of iron, steel and superconducting wire 300 feet underground in a 17-mile-long circular tunnel on the Franco-Swiss border. The most complex piece of scientific equipment ever built, the collider will send particles crashing into each other at just a wink shy of the speed of light, generating energies more powerful than the sun. Scientists like Mangano believe that this instrument, when it begins operating as early as this summer, will peer into a looking-glass world that could contain entrances to extra dimensions and super-massive partners of the familiar particles that make up our world. One creature that must be hiding there, the scientists say, is the Higgs particle, one of the most exotic undiscovered objects since the yeti.

Critics think the collider could also spawn a black hole that will swallow Earth.

That could be just an appetizer. Once the collider got going, according to the doomsday scenario, it could gobble up distant stars like a child popping Skittles. Mangano, who is part of the CERN group studying the safety of the collider, doesn't deny the scant possibility that the collider could yield a mini-black hole. By smashing protons and lead ions together at energies reaching 14 trillion electron volts, the Large Hadron Collider will dwarf the world's other atom smashers, including the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory's mighty Tevatron in Batavia, Ill. But that energy, Mangano hastened to add, would be concentrated in a space thinner than a human hair. Any black hole would be so tiny that it wouldn't be able to get its teeth around a bit of local chevre cheese, let alone the world. Still, if a black hole was produced at all, "that would be an extremely spectacular result," he said, a half-smile creeping across his face....

...The CERN collider uses a powerful electromagnetic field to accelerate particles. "Think of a swing," said Sandor Feher.... "Each time the beam comes around, the field pushes it a little faster." At the peak, the hydrogen protons in the new collider will reach 99.9999991% of the speed of light. Each packet of protons will complete 11,245 laps around the collider every second and carry as much power as a speeding train....Whatever objects spring into being in the collider won't last long. They will be relatively big and thus inherently unstable and will quickly decay into more-familiar particles. Some of these weird objects may travel as much as a millimeter or two before decaying, while others will travel less than the diameter of a proton before vanishing in a shower of quarks, gluons, electrons or neutrinos.

Because the detectors will produce millions of collisions every second, scientists will rely on huge clusters of computers to analyze the results. The computers will discard almost all the collisions, preserving only the most unusual for deeper analysis by humans....If all goes as planned, scientists say, the new collider is likely to become one of the greatest engines of discovery in history, far outstripping the Apollo moon missions and even Charles Darwin's monumental voyage aboard the Beagle. "This is the elevator that will take us to the next floor" of discovery, Mangano said.

...The huge burst of energy in particle collisions becomes a kind of time machine, transporting scientists back to the first microseconds after the Big Bang. The universe was only about 200 million miles wide, consisting of a viscous cloud of quarks and gluons floating in a searing plasma. As the universe expanded and cooled, the quarks combined to make protons and neutrons. The gluons held them together to form the nuclei of atoms. To re-create this plasma, one of the collider's detectors, known as ALICE, will accelerate heavy lead ions. One of the heaviest of all elements, each lead atom contains 82 protons and 125 neutrons. By pounding these sacks of protons and neutrons together, the scientists hope to free the quarks and gluons from their embrace into a free-floating quark-gluon plasma....

Then there's the matter of black holes. Harvey Newman, a Caltech physicist...said the collider could theoretically produce a mini-black hole by packing a tremendous amount of energy into a tiny space. But he said the black hole would pose no threat because it would last only 10-27 seconds before decaying -- hardly enough time to start gobbling up the French countryside. Critics are not convinced. Just last month, Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho filed suit in U.S. District Court in Honolulu to block the start-up of the new collider until CERN produces a comprehensive safety report. Speaking from Hawaii, Wagner said that despite assurances from scientists at CERN and around the world, there was no proof a mini-black hole would disappear. No one has ever seen it happen, said Wagner, who studied cosmic ray physics at UC Berkeley as a young man. It's just as possible that the tiny black hole would be stable and start chewing up normal matter, he said. It could take years for it to become large enough to gobble up the Earth, but there's no evidence that can't happen, he said. His suit for a restraining order is to "preserve the status quo while the court considers the arguments. In this case, the status quo is Mother Earth being here," he said.

Another nightmare possibility is that the collider could produce something called strange matter, a theoretical substance that some physicists think exists in the center of the remnants of collapsed stars. The pressure and temperature are so intense that the protons and electrons fuse into neutrons, then collapse into a mass of quarks. Theoretically, the tremendous gravity of strange matter would convert any ordinary matter it came in contact with. Mangano said he is now writing a report addressing such concerns. He said that protests of physics experiments were nothing new. "Before each new accelerator started, there has been some panic," he said. Wagner, in fact, filed suit in 1999 to stop Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in New York. It went ahead and the world survived -- just as it will this time, according to scientists from Mangano to Newman and Stephen Hawking....

This is an edited version--there's a lot more they hope to learn thanks to this machine--all of which is explained in the article here.

 

[neonlyte]

In another dimension, on a different time plane, there is a couple of bored super-beings stuck in an inter-galactic waiting room due to the temporary grounding of Pan-Galactic flights over some screw-up on maintenance schedules, and they are betting on the time takes for an evolving sub-species to disappear up its own black-hole.

 

[S-Des]

I say we blame Dr. M. He's all down with that science stuff.

 

[rgraham666]

But that energy, Mangano hastened to add, would be concentrated in a space thinner than a human hair. Any black hole would be so tiny that it wouldn't be able to get its teeth around a bit of local chevre cheese, let alone the world. Still, if a black hole was produced at all, "that would be an extremely spectacular result," he said, a half-smile creeping across his face....

I'm hoping this doesn't become the final example of 'famous last words'.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

I say we blame Dr. M. He's all down with that science stuff.

Dr. M's not happy. I'm no particle physicist, but I don't know of any way a "tiny" black hole would "decompose". Into what? They're the ultimate reduction of matter. Things don't get any simpler than them.

That's the thing about black holes. Like few things in this universe, all they do is suck.

 

[Edward Teach]

Dr. M's not happy. I'm no particle physicist, but I don't know of any way a "tiny" black hole would "decompose". Into what? They're the ultimate reduction of matter. Things don't get any simpler than them.

That's the thing about black holes. Like few things in this universe, all they do is suck.

I ain't no physicist neither, but in the world of subatomic particles, ain't space measured by human hairs pretty fuckin' big? And don't black holes grow if there's matter to consume?

 

[cantdog]

Dr. M's not happy. I'm no particle physicist, but I don't know of any way a "tiny" black hole would "decompose". Into what? They're the ultimate reduction of matter. Things don't get any simpler than them.

That's the thing about black holes. Like few things in this universe, all they do is suck.

A mini-black hole would head for the center of mass, locally, and sink in to the center of the earth. As it went, it would bore a little hole. A very little hole.

But nothing happens after that, except that it endlessly gets bigger. Inevitably. And yeah, given time, it wads Earth up like a ball of tissue paper and makes it disappear.

A very spectacular result indeed, the fellow says.

 

[geronimo_appleby]

so is this the time to re-negotiate a mortgage, or what?

 

[cantdog]

Well, the thing is, mini-black holes have been postulated for decades. They were supposed to have been able to form only in the conditions of the first nanoseconds of time itself, not long after the big bang, and it was difficult to see how they could have avoided being formed, if the math and the theory were correct that they could form at all. When first spoken of, it sure looked like they would have formed.

So that, in an ordinary way, if one found a mini-black-hole, one would be looking at a very ancient object indeed. Old enough to have become much larger over the eons, so none of them would be particularly tiny any longer, one supposes.

If the collider produces an environment so unnaturally severe as to resemble big bang times, which seems to be the idea, then we could make the first mini-black-holes since the beginning of time, barring other intelligent races. A great boon for confirming theory, but a sort of unpleasant time bomb in the center of the planet. As it progressed, it would be surrounded by a little whirlwind. Its passage through the lower wall of the collider structure itself would certainly bore a hole. One hopes it wouldn't screw up the collider. How many such holes would it take to allow the incredible energies in the collider to affect the structure? Would we expect only one such mini hole if there were conditions capable of producing them?

 

[Jenny_Jackson]

Why didn't they talk about this before they started building the fucker?

 

[neonlyte]

Why didn't they talk about this before they started building the fucker?

What gets me, is there starting it up now, while interest rates are low... I mean, couldn't they have done this in the early 90's?

 

[3113]

so is this the time to re-negotiate a mortgage, or what?

In this soft market? Better to just sell to some unsuspecting buyers and take the loss.

 

[3113]

Why didn't they talk about this before they started building the fucker?

Um...You all DO understand that the black hole scenario, cool as it is, is phenomenally improbable, right?

 

[geronimo_appleby]

In this soft market? Better to just sell to some unsuspecting buyers and take the loss.

i was just figuring that with the potential to destroy the world as we know it looming -- again -- i would prolly have more fun if i splurged some cash on a motorcycle?

 

[JagFarlane]

i was just figuring that with the potential to destroy the world as we know it looming -- again -- i would prolly have more fun if i splurged some cash on a motorcycle?

More than likely

 

[Jenny_Jackson]

My experience with engineers, I think, fits the CERN case. Engineers spend their entire lives designing perfection without regard for cost, utility or saleablility. Frankly, most of them have no sense at all.

Now give them a super cyclotron and I have to wonder what they can dream up to do with it. I find it kinda scary.

 

[oggbashan]

It's an expensive way to make the holes in Swiss Cheese.

It looks impressive.

Og

 

[elsol]

Um...You all DO understand that the black hole scenario, cool as it is, is phenomenally improbable, right?

So is intelligent life.

 

[SeaCat]

Now now children.

One of the other things they can do at CERN is creat minute amounts of Anti-Matter.

The odds of a black hole being created that lasts for longer than a split second are so incredible that they don't bear thinking about.

We'll put it this way, you have more chances of catching Hillary, Obama and George Jr in a three way in the Playboy Mansion(now there's a scene to make one shudder) than they do of creating a Balck Hole.

Cat

 

[shereads]

I think I know some people this has happened to. They're very long and sinewy, and nervous.

 

[shereads]

The Doomsday Vault people are going to be very unhappy with the Super Collider people.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/02/26/norway.seeds/

 

[neonlyte]

From BBC website
John Wheeler worked on the development of the atom bomb

John Wheeler, the US physicist who coined the term "black hole", has died at the age of 96.

He died at his New Jersey home on 13 April of pneumonia, his daughter said.

Involved in the Manhattan project that developed the world's first atomic bomb, Wheeler was one of Albert Einstein's last collaborators.

Wheeler, who was for many years a professor at Princeton University, also worked with Niels Bohr, the Nobel Prize-winning Danish scientist.

President George W Bush said he was saddened by the death of "one of America's greatest physicists" who had "worked on projects that changed the course of history".

The expression "black hole" became a household term after he used it to describe the phenomenon of a star collapsing into such a dense core that light cannot escape from it.

He made the name stick after someone else had suggested it as a replacement for the cumbersome "gravitationally completely collapsed star" he recalled.

Wheeler also helped nurture the careers of other eminent physcists, including Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, who was known as the "Great Explainer" because of his skill at making complex subjects accessible.

Probing frontiers

"Johnny Wheeler probed far beyond the frontiers of human knowledge, asking questions that later generations of physicists would take up and solve," said Kip Thorne, a professor of theoretical physics at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and another of Wheeler's students.

The former Princeton University professor died of pneumonia on Sunday at his home in Hightstown, New Jersey, according to his daughter Alison Wheeler Lahnston. He had been suffering from poor health for the past week.

Born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1911, Wheeler was 21 when he earned his doctorate in physics from Johns Hopkins University. In the mid-1930s, he travelled to Denmark to study for a year with Bohr, who won his Nobel for work describing the nature of the atom.

During World War II, he joined the Manhattan Project, the effort to create an atomic bomb for the US using nuclear fission.

Unlike some colleagues who regretted their roles after the bombs were dropped on Japan, Wheeler regretted that work on the bomb had not started earlier, feeling it would have saved millions of lives - including that of his brother Joe, who died fighting in Italy.

The physicist remained haunted by a note he received in 1944 from Joe which contained two words: "Hurry up".

During the 1950s and 60s, Professor Wheeler helped transform Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity.

He later helped physicist Edward Teller develop the even more powerful hydrogen bomb.

In 1953, while traveling on a sleeper car to Washington DC, Wheeler misplaced a classified paper on the hydrogen bomb which had been in his briefcase.

He was personally reprimanded by military officials at the behest of President Eisenhower and, as a passionate believer in national defence, was personally embarrassed by the incident.

Professor Wheeler moved to the University of Texas, Austin, in 1976 because he was facing mandatory retirement at Princeton.

During this time, he returned to questions in the field of quantum mechanics that had perplexed Einstein and Bohr. He would refer to these strange laws of physics as a "great smoky dragon".

His wife of more than 70 years, Janette, died in October. He is survived by three children and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

 

[3113]

So is intelligent life.

Why should we use the same formula for calculating the likelihood of intelligent life to the likelihood of a blackhole being formed from this collider? Why make the comparison at all? Just because one (intelligent life) is rare (presumably--and that's a big presumption--I'm not convinced of this gross generalization. A man in a desert may think water on this planet is rare, when, in fact, it's plentiful. We're in one tiny corner of an enormous galaxy in a universe with billions of galaxies! Intelligent life might not be all that improbable given such circumstances), and has happened within a universe of trillions of stars and planets doesn't make the likelihood of a blackhole happening with this one collider any more probable

 

[cantdog]

Um...You all DO understand that the black hole scenario, cool as it is, is phenomenally improbable, right?

Yeah, I know, but it's still cool .

 

[rgraham666]

If you regard the end of everything cool.