Atom-Smasher Could Open Black Hole, Reveal Secrets Of Science

The LA Times reports on the hair-raising concerns raised by some about the Large Hadron Collider, Europe's giant atom-smasher:

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...

...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...

...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.

Keep reading here.

The Large Hadron Collider is searching for the so-called God particle, which some scientists believe could unlock the secrets of the universe. Read more here.

Scroll down for pictures of the Large Hadron Collider:

Comments

[KQuark]

It's really shows the author does not know what they are talking about by even mentioning a black hole. The type of energy they are trying to produce on a microscopic scale is that of the big bang when all forms of energy where in a singular state of energy.

[bobdob]

I suggest reading the whole article before you make such sweeping pronouncements. The LHC is capable of creating collisions that reach energy levels in the range of 14 trillion eV. That's plenty of energy to create a micro black hole.

This is actually a fascinating argument. Critics worry that the if these micro black holes are created, they would exist in a stationary state (as opposed to being blown straight through the Earth, as would happen when a neutrino collides with an Earth particle). The folks at CERN claim that these micro black holes are created all the time in the natural universe anyway, so there's nothing to worry about. The argument is that if they were destructive, neutron stars couldn't exist because neutrinos can't pass through a neutron star. The critics theorize that while these micro black holes might take a hundred years or more to develop into something massive enough to be dangerous, the possibility make further study necessary. They're calling for an international peer review before the LHC is put into service.

As the article points out: "If [the critics] were just crackpots, we could wave them away. But some are real physicists."

[KQuark]

The LHC is an amazing project that could give us the keys to the existence of the universe itself. The US use to be the leader in particle physics but no more because we are busy fighting wars and making star wars weapons. The LHC will produce energies unimaginable that will close the door on the Standard Model of Particle Physics and hopefully lead us to insights into the theory of everything.

[Dap]

Just more junk science by some QM master physicist dreaming about being the first to dicover the model of everything "The Spaghetti theory". LOL

[procrustes]

Yeah, maybe...but the Flying Spagetti Monster is the real true god.

[moderationsmuse]

More junk science? I certainly didn't see this coming, Dap? What kind of science is valid? Only science that could somehow disprove God?
Gotta say, Dap. You're an enigma (connundrum wrapped in a riddle).

[Dap]

Dear Muse,

What you don't get, and I keep telling you my forte' is psychology and logic (the science of reason) my being an enigma must come from the days when I was a believer. :-) Agape.

[rextrek]

There is a Black Hole on the Earth..it's called Iraq! It swallows up all our Nations resources,Lives of soldiers and citizens....

[kellygrrrrl]

Impressive! How long did it take you to come up with that!
I hate the real tragedy of Black Hole being trivialized.

[Virago55]

Are we still talking about Hillary (i.e. Big Black Hole) also known as her mouth.

[Boboday555]

No!
We're discussing the tiniest of known particles, or as I like to refer to them as, Bush's Brain.

[guntotinganglion]

Let's just say the creation of a black hole by the LHC is a possibility. As I've read, scientists can't totally rule out the possibility that it might not create dragons...but in both case, the odds are remote in the extreme.

There are other possible dangers, with one in particular being from Timothy Ferris's book "The Whole Shebang". It refers to the possibility of a state of "false vacuum" in the universe. It references the possibility of "something" triggering the collapse of this false vacuum into a lower energy state. Specifically, a concentration of too much energy in one point in spacetime setting off a universal collapse. And here I quote Ferris directly....

"Years ago, a few physicists worried aloud about whether a collider experiment might inadvertently pump enough energy into the vacuum to do the trick. To call this event the worst possible laboratory accident is to understate the case. The false vacuum would tear open, creating a bubble of lower-energy vacuum that instantly propagated in all directions at the velocity of light, destroying everything it touched."

Perhaps a quantum black hole wouldn't be so bad. If one were created, it would fall to the center of the Earth where, if it didn't evaporate as Hawking predicts, it would consume the Earth. It would likely take a minimum of millions of years, if not billions to swallow the Earth. So, not to worry...unless Smaug comes flying out of the LHC and puts everything to flame!

[iseebs]

I expected the greatest nation on earth to have this kind of technology.
It’s in Switzerland (about the size of Rhode Island). Could it be that someone is jealous?
The Europeans’ demonstrate their technological superior and work hard not to be overrun by China, India and South Korea.

[GuiltyByStander]

Something else the Swiss are famous for -- a national draft and staying out of wars.

[GoreyFantod]

Don't forget hiding the assets of the super-rich & laundering treasure stolen by the NSDAP.

[researcher]

the dollar is worth what to the euro? the end is near for we americans we have been living on borrowed money for years.

and americans fear socialism all the while they are drowing in debt with their capitalism. bye bye middle class capitalism is designed to eliminate the middle class fools. reagan knew this but sold americans the trickle down theory to eliminate the middle class.

oh the pitfalls of reagan economics. and the middle class bought it lock stock and barrel.

a nation almost always deserves its leaders.

printed money chinese money cheap interest rates to combat a declining nation. all the while americans shop till they drop.

now where is my 600 dollar check from the irs. mail it soon so i can go shop at wal mart.

[shockmagog]

"I expected the greatest nation on earth to have this kind of technology."

You don't remember the Superconducting Supercollider? One of the most tragic strategic science and technology blunders in U.S. scientific history:

'The Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) was a square particle accelerator which was planned to be built in Texas. It was planned to have a ring circumference of 87 km (64 miles) and an energy of 30 TeV per beam, potentially enough energy to create a Higgs boson, a particle predicted by the Standard Model, but not yet detected.'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider

'The Superconducting Super Collider Laboratory project at this site was canceled by the federal government in 1993, after 14 miles of tunnels were completed and two billion dollars spent. The project was directed by the US Department of Energy and was to include a 54 mile long particle accelerator loop. The $11 billion project would have been the largest experimental facility ever built.'
http://ludb.clui.org/ex/i/TX3155/

More on the SSC's obituary:
http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/ssc-and-future.html

After thousands of scientists and technicians left their posts at other institutions to join the project, and then the subsequent loss of revenue to that part of rural Texas, and last but not least, the loss of knowledge and prestige that set us back 20 years.

[moderationsmuse]

I disagree. What's wrong with this project being in Switzerland. And what relevance has the size of the host country got to do with scientific experiment?
True, it might have been nice to have made their decision $11 billion dollars earlier. But other than that, I find this whole aside to be meaningless.
Let is be a source of Swiss pride.

[Earl]

Texans don't want anything built that threatens Jesus.

[milo9]

I believe that we can, if need be, plug any resulting black hole with the B.S. belching from the Clinton Campaign.

[jimmyaj]

In the 60s nuclear bombs kept getting bigger and bigger. People kept saying one would someday start a chain reaction that would turn the earth itself into a nuclear bomb. Of course any thermonuclear bomb man could engineer could not be powerful enough to do something like that. And those bombs released a lot more energy than any reaction CERN's LHC will create. Black holes on a sub atomic scale probably do exist anyway (for micro-bursts of time). And they haven't swallowed the universe, yet, and even if it happens, believe me, you wouldn't notice it!

If these people are so concerned, they should get off their asses and out of their houses and take a few advanced math courses and a course of physics classes so they can understand what they're talking about.

[shockmagog]

I've been participating in the LHC's Open Infrastructure Distributed Computing project for the past couple of years. Anyone who has a computer and and Internet connection can join (unfortunately LHC project's particular algorithms are not Mac compatible). It's a way of putting a computer's unused cycles to good use. There's about 20,000 or so of us regular volunteers to run the data. The program that runs the computations is totally unobtrusive for the average computer (you never notice that it's running). What the average person's computer has been doing here so far, is computing the best way to align the gigantic electromagnets as the collider was being assembled. This was so when the atomic particles are run around the ring at close to light speed, the magnets would keep pushing them forward, and keep them from hitting the walls so they could go "around the track" for as long as possible.

In the future the LHC will continue to need the Distributed Computing network when it becomes operational this fall.
http://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/
http://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/download.php

[BillCarson]

Cool. It also runs on Linux too.

It's like the folding@home project for protein folding
http://folding.stanford.edu/

or the seti@home project for finding ET...
http://setiweb.ssl.berkeley.edu/

[shockmagog]

Yes! BOINC works with many projects. I'm doing Seti, and Einstein@home as well. I switched over to Seti BOINC the day it went online. It got off to a rocky start of course, but it's much less problematic now (though not as pretty) as the old Seti@home.

[kellygrrrrl]

The Black Hole is the name of real life Bushie covert operations. Notice no HIV among the black rutters these days? They've a new strain of STD introduced by the neocons, thus The Black Hole.

[castlerider]

I hear it was first discovered being passed in bathroom stalls.

[Sumocat]

As far as anyone knows, it takes a stellar mass to form a black hole. Fear that a dangerous black hole, as opposed to a subatomic pinhole, could be formed in an atom-smasher suffers from a profound lack of support.

[SlinkyTWF]

That was the plot of "Thrice Upon a Time" by James P. Hogan. He referred to the pinhole masses as "bugophants." Of course, his science experiment involved a fusion reactor, but the rub was when the micro-hypermass objects started falling through the Earth's core and emerging on the other side, only to be pulled back in by gravity, they gathered more and more mass each time. In the story, this would have eventually caused the destruction of the planet.

It was a love story, by the way...

[adled]

The notion is not only ridiculous, it is the opposite of hubris.

[googlymoogly]

This " Large Hadron Collider " will finaly prove that intelligent design is not a theory and how the universe was created by a giant mystical being that was living in a "Black Hole..."

Praise Jesus!

[peterg76]

I can sympathize with the apprehension when the obliteration of human civilization is at stake, but these energies already exist in nature without spawning black holes.

[LeftLeanWing]

The absurdity of this 'Black Hole That Could Swallow The Earth" scare put out by critics of this experiement shows there ignorance.

A Black Hole's gravity at a given distance from it's center will be the same as the original object's gravity before it turned into a black hole. Gravity is based on an objects total mass not it's state of existance.

Example:

If our sun turned into a black hole; then the gravity we feel on earth would not change and we would orbit this black hole exactly the same as the sun originally existed.

So all you critics: Just Shut Up !

[jimmyaj]

"If our sun turned into a black hole; then the gravity we feel on earth would not change and we would orbit this black hole exactly the same as the sun originally existed."

But what would happen to all the light and heat we get from the sun...? We would notice a difference...

[LeftLeanWing]

Oh Yes,
We would be dead, but the Earth, in the words of the Great Songtress Celine Dion ;) - 'Will Go On' after being baked to a crisp by gamma rays.