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Worst Case: Collider Spawns Planet-Devouring Black Hole

Science & Tech (tags: science, big bang, discovery, fear )

Maria
- 71 days ago - news-panther.nationalgeographic.com

With the Large Hadron Collider firing up for the first time Wednesday, some critics have speculated that the world's biggest atom smasher could spawn a black hole that would devour Earth.

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Comments

Robert Marsh II (75)

Wednesday September 10, 2008, 11:14 am
The most dangerous phase of the LHC operations will be during the scheduled 2009 ALICE Experiments, switching from protons to heavy Lead (Pb) ion collisions. These collisions will be at 'real' full-power after all the preliminary safety test circulations and initial test collisions through the end of 2008. They are known to create hyper-density plasmatic luminosities (extreme-thick high-magnitude energy fields). If there are any major misinterpretations of the current 'Standard Model', then your guess is as good as any qualified scientific guess, as to the experimental outcomes! However, if everything goes well, then a mind-boggling myriad of technological advances will emerge into the public domain!
Everyone is now invited to join an ongoing personal CERN LHC/ALICE/ATLAS Public Debate Forum through the following Url:
http://thefifthknight.blogspot.com/

Panthera Leo (7)

Thursday September 11, 2008, 11:41 am
This almost certainly can't happen. Even if black holes do form in the accelerator, (which is very unlikely in the first place), they will be microscopic and unstable. Further more, Hawkings predicts any such black holes would evaporate nearly instantly.

This same arguemt was rasied by those who tried to stop RHIC from starting in New York (which has been colliding heavy lead ions for years now). None of the doomsday predictions happened then. And they won't this time either. Some scientists believe RHIC has created micro-black holes already. But as Hawking predicted, they evaporated nearly instantaneously cause they are very unstable.

also, keep in mind that a micro black hole would have an event horizon so incredibly small, that something would practically have to be touching the service of it to get caught. This isn't the kind of thing that is going to devour the earth even if one does get created inside of the accelerator.

Lindsey O. (127)

Thursday September 11, 2008, 9:12 pm
And they told Christopher Columbus that he was going to sail off the edge of the world if he ventured too far into the Atlantic....