Cheers,
T.

don’t forget that even two protons and another neutron are sufficient to make a neutron stable. No need to involve neutron stars…

Cheers,
T.

My answer is YES! and it was completely ignored in contemporary models. As we know, the pressure inside of tiny water droplets of micrometer size is similar to hydrostatic pressure in 150 meter depth because of their surface tension. It seems, that observed evidence of stable tetra and pentaneutronium states is supporting this hypothesis. You can imagine the consequences at the case of more dense quark matter for yourself.

In addition, existing safety analysis considers generally low crossection of black hole interaction with terrestrial matter considering, every black hole will evaporate first, then it can swallow a sufficient amount of matter. Here we are neglecting the fact, the black hole or strangellet produced can exhibit a strong charge and or magnetic moment, i.e. it will attract and interact with surrounding matter a much faster, then every safety analysis has every considered (compare the Dr. Otto Rossler’s web for further details. http://www.lhcfacts.org/ )

The planet was flat…exactly? thats actually a very good example Phil Warnell! Back then people were told that the planet was flat, untill someone decided to find out. It could of went either way which tells you what?

Another…The Titanic, what did ‘THEY’ call it. The unsinkable Ship, Full speed ahead Captain… Ya think if some “bozo” from Honolulu decided to argue people would have listened, hell no.

Enron…Everybody is buying shares everybody is doing it…ALL IN!!!…

Do you see where im going with this. It is not because just a FEW are saying things that are argumentive, automatically they are wrong. It is not because EVERYONE is saying it that it is RIGHT…This is why wars are started because people do not open there minds to ALL arguments. LHC COULD GO WRONG it is NOT 100% safe and YOU nor CERN can back that up… Black hole i don’t know, lets look into it with people that are not HIRED by an allready 8billion dollar spent project. What do you think?

As for Big Foot well thats a joke but then again the fact is, is that nothing is impossible due to the simple reality of the unkown. Go back 400 hundred years, do you think people thought we would be flying arround in Jets and living with “the” Indians…Besides Big Foot would change nothing in my life, playing arround with science COULD.

Now lets go hang a key at the end of a kite and wait for a thunder storm

I love the idea of the LHC but yes it does scare me a bit. I am not worried about dragons popping out as our cocky friend wrote. I am worried about the unknown and the funding problems that are now speeding up the project. We look at our History and learn that many times in science we have learned from our mistake. Is this going to be the final mistake that will end our planet and destroy humanity?

Aren’t we truly doing something here which HASN’t BEEN DONE BEFORE in search of a better understanding of things which we DO NOT FULLY UNDERSTAND? Isn’t there a long history of finding things in such experiments which we did not expect, and of learning things in the process of such experiments which proved things to be true that we did not predict to BE true? Aren’t we actually messing around with the fundamental forces of the universe here with no clear idea of the potential consequences of doing that? I mean, people may say Yeah or Nay on black holes and their stability or non-stability. It’s all very interesting conjecture, but who the hell really KNOWS how it will turn out in reality? Hawking has been wrong on black holes before- by his own admission. How can we know in advance what is going to happen? Maybe- just maybe- we should think this through a bit more ?

Again, I support CERN, and I dont’ EXPECT them to blow up the Earth, but at the same time, the Fermi Paradox is like a nagging doubt in the back of my mind… Maybe the answer to the Fermi Paradox is that the technological thresh-hold required to do these types of potentially self-anihlllating experiments is the common pre-cursor to an advanced civilization’s ability to establish a permanent presence in space. Maybe advanced life in the universe destroys ITSELF on a regular basis. The deafening silence out there almost IMPLIES that SOMETHING bad happens to complex Life- if it does exist out there- right at about our current level of technology. As much as I support basic research, I just wish we knew a little bit more about the ground upon which we are about to tread as a species.

Ti ringrazio per le tue risposte.
I truly appreciate you taking the time to explain in relatively simple terms.
It is difficult for someone with a humanities background to do his “share of the homework”, however what seems clear to me now is that wild speculations and sensationalistic communication can be found on both sides of the fence.
It depends who you ask.

Ciao, Stefano

the LHC was not built to produce black holes. Indeed, it is a speculation which appeared long after the machine was funded and its construction started. It stems from the theory of large extra dimensions, which was born as a speculation by Nima Arkani-Hamed and Gia Dvali in 1998, and acquired momentum later thanks to the fact that it predicts observable signatures -most of which are NOT black hole production at colliders, but rather monojet events and other less exotic processes.

You are supposed to believe physicists, and not cranks. The gentlemen who filed a certain lawsuit (you know which one, but I will not say it here, since they have shown to be reading blogs and threaten to sue whomever damages their reputation) are not scientists as far as I understand.

Of course you can choose to rather believe in speculations. But Hawking radiation, you see, is not a speculation in the sense that large extra dimensions with a TeV quantum gravity scale is. Because the former is a necessary consequence of thermodynamics, quantum physics and general relativity, the latter is a fancy construct that has an exceedingly slight chance of being correct (LEDs) combined with a extremely improbable and fine-tuned constant made such that it creates a problem. Why not a 100 GeV quantum gravity scale then ? Because it would not make much sense AND it would have been detected already.

Scientists are not good communicators. On this you certainly have a point. I do my little bit here to change that. But you – the audience – must do you share of the homework, and understand the difference between a rational argument and a wild speculation.

Cheers
T.

You see, the statement about evaporating black holes is one that has been disturbing me since I found out about the LHC safety debate.

Even CERN in their own webpage quotes “Black holes lose matter through the emission of energy via a process discovered by Stephen Hawking. Any black hole that cannot attract matter, such as those that might be produced at the LHC, will shrink, evaporate and disappear. The smaller the black hole, the faster it vanishes. If microscopic black holes were to be found at the LHC, they would exist only for a fleeting moment. They would be so short-lived that the only way they could be detected would be by detecting the products of their decay.” http://public.web.cern.ch/PUBLIC/en/LHC/Safety-en.html

It remains that communication by the scientific community to the uninitiated public has been (and still is) shambolic.
Not communicating on issues as important as this is not an option, however bad communication creates the situation that we are experiencing now.

If you want to blame someone you can do much better than looking at Wagner and Sancho by focussing your attention to articles like this one: http://www.unisci.com/stories/20014/1001012.htm

How can any (non physicist) normal human being read the unisci article and not worry?
Ah, but it’s OK, Stephen Hawking has a theory that small black holes will evaporate very quickly. Phew. We’re safe now.

And what is it then? Can the LHC create black holes or can it not? You and many others seem to think it is (extremely) improbable, as many others seem to think that it is desirable and the collider has been built with this (too) in mind.

Who am I (average non-physicist individual) supposed to believe?

I am under the impression that at times the scientific community is asking us to have faith in their superior knowledge.

Faith.

I heard that word before.

you have to understand that we are considering an exceedingly improbable situation here: we have to

1) assume that there exist large extra dimensions
2) assume that the scale of quantum gravity is at LHC reach
3) assume that the quite solid predictions of Hawking radiation are bogus;
4) assume that for some unknown reason the rapidity distribution of black hole production is extremely weird (otherwise they would have enough energy to escape the earth’s gravitational field).

It would be too silly to attach numbers to such a ridiculous streak of assumptions. I would rather say I find more probable that proton-proton collisions at LHC create mutated bacteria that kill all human beings (I think this idea comes from Bee; another idea I heard is the creation of dragons that eat us all, but I find bacteria mutation quite more likely). In any case, there are better things to worry about.

Please understand that scientists do not usually shrug shoulders. Most of us are believers, in fact, and not skeptics! But despite the fact that we have not spent our life cooking black holes in our kitchens, we have nonetheless a pretty good idea of what termodynamics and general relativity are. If you feel disturbed by what can appear a thoughtless remark, you must realize it comes by people who are nauseated by cransk whose job is speculating on science for personal profit.

Cheers,
T

It is exactly this type of statements that rubbish each and every other argument on the safety of the LHC. It is exactly this religious belief in theories that have never ever been proved about things that have never ever been observed that make me worry about the whole LHC affair.
“If by chance one were produced, it would evaporate almost immediately.” as if you, your family and Stephen Hawking have been cooking Black Holes in your kitchen for generations and know exactly how they taste when you put too much salt. Geez.

yes you did say naive I appreciate handwaving arguments when they shed light on the matter, but I am left in the dark trying to understand your argument above… Anyway I am not the only reader here so you need not worry about educating me to your peculiar way of computing cross sections – others may understand it better than I do. I acknowledge that your prediction is that we will not be eaten up by LHC collisions – a bet you will be most likely to have to cash rather than pay.

Cheers,
T.

indeed, my comment was not sarcastic. The fact is that what is funded is not always scientific, and that good proposal often get sacked. Politics has a big weight in all the decisions concerning what science we are allowed to do, unfortunately.

Cheers,
T.

“Please go ahead Phil, getting funded and doing science are two very different things nowadays.”

Despite how I might or others take the above, we agree. I simply find it disturbing that the SSC project was at first delayed and then totally scrapped after more then a third the required investment spent principally because politicians halted it as it to being not worthwhile. Now we have the LHC, just weeks away from being a reality, to perhaps also be delayed in it’s startup and schedule mainly due to the concerns of one contended by many as a poorly qualified scientist and the perceived hesitance of one other scientist recognized by many as to be qualified. Also, I am the first to admit I am not among your peers, yet I would contend I am more aware of the agenda, tactics, and motives of those I’m certain to be behind all this. They are of course the ones that hold humanity back from perhaps evolving to achieve our potential for reasons I already stated. For them or for those that are unwittingly dubbed to further their program, I wish them no success or recognize any validity in irrational fear.

Best,

Phil

Hi Louise, thank you for the nice explanation. Yes, black holes are not so terrible after all…

Lubos, was it your new book which caused you to travel to Paris ? I have to say, the subject of your work is a cunning intuition. How are sales going ?

Cheers all,
T.

Recently I’ve seen a few pieces by Michelangelo in the Louvre.

A typical Primordial Black Hole has a mass of about 10^11 kg. Since this is more than the mass of LHC, one theoretically produced there would be even smaller. If you were only one meter away from this PBH, the gravitational tug would be only 2/3 what you feel from Earth.

Suppose you were suicidal, reached out and touched the PBH. The first gram of your fingertip would be turned into about 10^13 joules of radiation, the yield of a small nuclear warhead.

The rest of you would be blown into the next county, easily exceeding the Black Hole’s tiny escape velocity. You would not be sucked into the Black Hole even if you wanted to be!

Unless you believe in extra dimensions, LHC is not powerful enough to produce a stable Black Hole. If by chance one were produced, it would evaporate almost immediately. I hope this makes everyone sleep better at night.