Why the LHC (still) won’t destroy the earth

[qubit]

Ahhh, if only...

1. Microscopic black holes are implausible.
While a teaspoon of neutron star material might weigh several million tons, if you extract a teaspoon of neutron star material from a neutron star it will immediately blow out into the volume you might expect several million tons of mass to usually occupy.

Notwithstanding you can’t physically extract a teaspoon of black hole material from a black hole – if you could, it is reasonable to expect that it would also instantly expand. You can’t maintain these extreme matter densities outside of a region of extreme gravitational compression that is created by the proper mass of a stellar-scale object.

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2. A hypothetical microscopic black hole couldn’t devour the Earth anyway.
Although whatever goes on inside the event horizon of a black hole is a bit mysterious and unknowable – physics still operates in a conventional fashion outside. The gravitational influence exerted by the mass of a black hole falls away by the inverse square of the distance from it, just like it does for any other celestial body.

The gravitational influence exerted by a microscopic black hole composed of, let’s say 1000 hyper-compressed protons, would be laughably small from a distance of more than its Schwarzschild radius (maybe 10-18 metres). And it would be unable to consume more matter unless it could overcome the forces that hold other matter together – remembering that in quantum physics, gravity is the weakest force.

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3. What the doomsayers say
When challenged with the standard argument that higher-than-LHC energy collisions occur naturally and frequently as cosmic ray particles collide with Earth’s upper atmosphere, LHC conspiracy theorists refer to the high school physics lesson that two cars colliding head-on is a more energetic event than one car colliding with a brick wall. This is true, to the extent that the two car collision has twice the kinetic energy as the one car collision. However, cosmic ray collisions with the atmosphere have been measured as having 50 times the energy that will ever be generated by LHC collisions.

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So, sorry to disappoint all you conspiracy theorists out there, but it won't. Also, check out the high powered equation-filled posts from poster lcrowell following the article!

The so called black hole that would materialize here is a bit different from our standard notion of a black hole. If you scatter two particles at sqrt{s} = 7TeV, and up to 14 TeV in a few years, the energy goes into a wide range of possible channels. This can result in a plasma of quarks and gluons that lasts about 10^{-24}sec. This might have amplitudes that correspond to AdS/black hole physics. The 10 dimensional universe in super gravity at low energy is 3+1 space plus time and the other 6 dimensions become folded into Calabi-Yau (CY) spaces.

Goes right over my head, but from what I can see, it's not BS.

Universe Today

 

[twilyth]

We're doomed!

There are so many things the standard model can't account for and there is probably a huge amount of new physics (what physicists consider gettin' some 'strange') out there. So you really can't rule anything out. Even scientists thought there was a remote chance that the first atomic bomb could ignite the atmosphere.

Plus, unlike cosmic rays, you have an incredible density of sub-atomic particles that you would never see in naturally occurring cosmic rays. Maybe that doesn't matter, but maybe it does.

Personally, I don't think there is anything to worry about, but the whole point of the LHC is to discover new phenomena. If it only succeeds in proving the existence of the Higgs boson and confirming the standard model, I think it will be a huge disappointment. So it's probably not wise to rule out the wildly improbable or even the impossible.

 

[qubit]

Well, the scientific explanation of why it couldn't possibly make a black hole is pretty convincing to me. They even explain how if it even existed, it couldn't grow.

And they talking quite definitively about it too, not just speculating.

 

[twilyth]

You're right, they probably have that one locked down. I was being more grandiose.

I mean the RHIC has been creating a quark-gluon plasma for a while now with no problems.

 

[Drone]

Maybe then I could play DOOM for real. I just need to find a rocket launcher and a chainsaw.



Well I still don't see how Higgs Bosons (LHC's main goal) and gravitons can cause blackhole formation. That particles maybe don't even exist in the first place. And I doubt they ever can recreate the Bing Bang anyway. But LHC is indeed a very important thing for the human race lol.

 

[twilyth]

The quark gluon plasma I think is what existed just a few seconds after the big bang - maybe less - and that has been done over and over again at the RHIC by colliding counter-rotating beams of gold ions. That's probably the closest to a big bang we're going to get.

I'm not worried about black holes. Were I to worry, it would be about stuff that we don't even know about yet. You can't predict the unknown.

 

[D4S4]

The gravitational influence exerted by a microscopic black hole composed of, let%u2019s say 1000 hyper-compressed protons, would be laughably small from a distance of more than its Schwarzschild radius (maybe 10-18 metres).

if you compressed earth to a black hole, it's schwarzshchild radius would be no bigger than say, a basketball. therefore, a 1000 proton black hole's schwarzshchild radius would be measured in planck lenghts (and that's freaky small).

 

[Drone]

The quark gluon plasma I think is what existed just a few seconds after the big bang - maybe less - and that has been done over and over again at the RHIC by colliding counter-rotating beams of gold ions.

Particles created in LHC collisions have greater energy than those at RHIC.

http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/bre...experiments-dive-into-the-quark-gluon-plasma/

 

[twilyth]

I know. My point was that you don't get much closer to the actual big bang than that.

 

[Drone]

You never know what is closer and what is further