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Can a quantum black hole destroy the Earth ?


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Can the Large Hadron Collider produce a black hole and what would happen to us if it actually did ?

As scientists continue to work on making the world's largest atom smasher even more powerful following the discovery of the Higgs boson, some people have expressed concerns over the possibility that the high-energy collisions within the accelerator could produce a quantum black hole that will end up destroying the entire planet.

Read More: http://www.unexplain...stroy-the-earth

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Our nation is $17.5 trillion dollars in debt. Now there's a black hole to worry about.

Look there is always a risk in scientific exploration. Supposedly when we detonated the first Hydrogen bomb over the ocean some scientists were concerned there was a tiny chance it might atomically ignite the hydrogen in the ocean's water molecules turning the earth into a cinder, or at least so I have heard.

I would suspect the chances of us creating a black hole in a lab that destroys the planet is very small.

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At first the size of the blackhole is minimal, but it will grow bigger through time.

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In any case, researchers now reveal they have not yet detected any sign of quantum black holes being created by the LHC.

I'm calling BS. If they detected a mini Black Hole and released that information to the public it would probably cause a panic.

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Are we really back to this LHC black hole nonesense again?

Let the science do the science!

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Why does the term "black hole" invoke peculiar responses? and theories? and...

Isn't it just a dense mass from the collapse of a star? A mass that gains size to the point that it is so dense it can generates so much gravity that light can not escape? There are many other things that can not escape prior to that (massive size) due to gravity, and they too have nothing to do with a doomsday of Earth!

What gives? [or takes, in this case?]

Would people fear a quantum quasar? Would that mean the Earth will go nova?

Hummm. Instead lets work on this [trick] question:

How much mass would it take to prevent sound (as in "the speed of sound") from escaping a mass because of intense gravity?

Edited by MyOtherAccount
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I think you mean light and the speed of light; either that or you are joking.

I dare say a sizable black hole coming our way would make things unpleasant. I think (but I may have this wrong) that the limiting factor on a black hole in the earth eating us up would be its surface area and how much it is thereby able to suck in per unit of time. A "quantum sized" black hole would not even be able to chew an atom properly.

Edited by Frank Merton
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At first the size of the blackhole is minimal, but it will grow bigger through time.

No it won't, because it needs a huge amount of mass with which to suck in surrounding matter. A black hold created in the LHC will be microscopic, and - like all black holes - will evaporate. Because they're so small, the quantum black holes will evaporate in less than a second, as opposed to the millions of years a larger one takes.

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Apparently I cannot quote on my phone so this is for comment number 5. There is very real and very good reasons scientist need to have to over watch of the public. Over the century there have been several governments who took your view of science, and we ended up with some of the most evil and horrific experiments in our history. The first that comes to my mind is unit 731 and next the Tuskegee syphilis study. A objective mind has no room for compassion or respect for life. There fore it absolutely MUST have a balance to insure the science that is being discovered is worth the pain and suffering being absorbed by the expiermentee.

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Apparently I cannot quote on my phone so this is for comment number 5. There is very real and very good reasons scientist need to have to over watch of the public. Over the century there have been several governments who took your view of science, and we ended up with some of the most evil and horrific experiments in our history. The first that comes to my mind is unit 731 and next the Tuskegee syphilis study. A objective mind has no room for compassion or respect for life. There fore it absolutely MUST have a balance to insure the science that is being discovered is worth the pain and suffering being absorbed by the expiermentee.

What you say doesn't seem to me to have anything to do with not causing a panic. Governments have to do things that are not compassionate all the time, like put people in jail or seize their property in eminent domain procedures or collect on tax liens or evict non-rent-paying tenants. I think preventing riots and panics falls generally along those lines.
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Well it will only evaporate if Hawking radiation is indeed right. But that's not why it won't do any damage. When the thing is created by collisions, even if it didn't evaporate it will be traveling at significant portions if the speed of light. It will zing away from the planet and solar system at those speeds even if it goes straight through the earth itself. It might pick up a tiny but if mass as it goes, but still it will pass through any matter much like a nutreno. If they manage to contain it, and it dosnt evaporate then we could potentially have a problem. But that simply isn't what is happening.

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Well it will only evaporate if Hawking radiation is indeed right. But that's not why it won't do any damage. When the thing is created by collisions, even if it didn't evaporate it will be traveling at significant portions if the speed of light. It will zing away from the planet and solar system at those speeds even if it goes straight through the earth itself. It might pick up a tiny but if mass as it goes, but still it will pass through any matter much like a nutreno. If they manage to contain it, and it dosnt evaporate then we could potentially have a problem. But that simply isn't what is happening.

No we wouldn't have a problem. It wouldn't weigh anything (or, very very little); and a black hole's destructive force comes from its enormous mass.

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A black hold created in the LHC will be microscopic, and - like all black holes - will evaporate.

This is incorrect because as per todays level of astronomic physics there is no evidence and no observation available

that describes or confirms a hypothetical possibility of disappearance of black holes into nothing or better say into a

fragmentation into its single components or transformation into energy only, resulting into conditions those changed

the original status.

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If black holes don't evaporate as originally thought (and I must say I've read the stuff on this and it makes no sense to me, but then that is not relevant), then would this be an explanation of why the hypothetical mini-black holes that were thought to have been made by the big bag and should be evaporating about now in bursts of gamma radiation are not being detected.

I had earlier thought that the non-detections were explained by saying apparently they weren't created after all.

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No we wouldn't have a problem. It wouldn't weigh anything (or, very very little); and a black hole's destructive force comes from its enormous mass.

Not at all. It comes from its enormous density and the gravity that comes from it. It's mass doesn't really have that much to do with it yet. If it did not evaporate or shoot off into space and we couldn't contain it, it would fall toward the center of the earth. Now its difficult to know without some serious math if it would accelerate enough as it fell to achieve escape velocity, but friction is not going to be a problem because it would simply absorb any thing it hits. It would fall through matter as if it were not there gaining in mass Every time it made contact with other particles. It might be slow at first because atoms are mostly space, but it would be exponential as it picked up more and more mass. Eventually if it did not end up in some kind of orbit, it would probably settle at the center of gravity of the earth growing very slowly be ever so exponentially. Eventually it would pick up enough mass to indeed destroy the earth. Once it was big enough to really start sucking up matter it would be like a little growing wrecking ball at the center of the earth. I don't know how long this would take but it could be many thousands of years if not much more.

Of course hawking is probably right and it will evaporate in seconds, and there is no way we are going to stop it from zinging away at an incredibly high speed unless we can maintain its trajectory around the LHC, and slow it down the same way we sped it up. That would be interesting to see if the LHC has a reverse lever.. Probably not.

Edited by White Crane Feather
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If black holes don't evaporate as originally thought (and I must say I've read the stuff on this and it makes no sense to me, but then that is not relevant), then would this be an explanation of why the hypothetical mini-black holes that were thought to have been made by the big bag and should be evaporating about now in bursts of gamma radiation are not being detected.

I had earlier thought that the non-detections were explained by saying apparently they weren't created after all.

Or it might be that the particular BB model which has the event creating mini-black holes is incorrect, and that mini- and micro- black holes do evaporate, as theory predicts they should, so we would have nothing to worry about - even though the collisions in the uprated LHC are not expected to be energetic enough to create a micro-black hole.

WCF,

Not at all. It comes from its enormous density and the gravity that comes from it. It's mass doesn't really have that much to do with it yet.

Emma is quite correct, and it is mass which is the cause of gravity. The density of the object has no bearing on that, except allow for other objects to approach closer to the centre of gravity.

Edited by Leonardo
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Or it might be that the particular BB model which has the event creating mini-black holes is incorrect, and that mini- and micro- black holes do evaporate, as theory predicts they should, so we would have nothing to worry about - even though the collisions in the uprated LHC are not expected to be energetic enough to create a micro-black hole.

WCF,

Emma is quite correct, and it is mass which is the cause of gravity. The density of the object has no bearing on that, except allow for other objects to approach closer to the centre of gravity.

Ok... Sure.. I figured that sentence was the wrong way to put it... But the results are the same.

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Or it might be that the particular BB model which has the event creating mini-black holes is incorrect, and that mini- and micro- black holes do evaporate, as theory predicts they should, so we would have nothing to worry about - even though the collisions in the uprated LHC are not expected to be energetic enough to create a micro-black hole.

WCF,

Emma is quite correct, and it is mass which is the cause of gravity. The density of the object has no bearing on that, except allow for other objects to approach closer to the centre of gravity.

Ok... Sure.. I figured that sentence was the wrong way to put it... But the results are the same. I don't think she/he is correct. From a particle stand point mass is about one thing that affects another. Mass is not gravity. Of course they are related.... But if you can tell me how then I will recommend you both for a Nobel prize.

Edit: I'm not talking about mathematical relationships though :(

Edited by White Crane Feather
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The greatly overrated Stephen Hawking may or may not be correct in saying that black holes evaporate - in the absence of any conveniently tiny black holes to observe, it's rather hard to tell, which is why he has yet to receive the Nobel Prize. And unless I'm missing something very important, it would seem to contradict the extremely well-established theory of general relativity, which states that the acceleration of matter falling into the singularity at the heart of a black hole must reach the speed of light, therefore time stops relative to the rest of the Universe. If the fortunately inaccessible bit in the middle is literally outside time, it's hard to see how it can evaporate!

But the crucial point about black holes is that they're so compact that they have a very small mouth, so they're not very efficient at swallowing matter - that's why the absolutely gigantic black holes now known to exist, including the colossal specimen at the heart of our galaxy, simply aren't a problem. A subatomic black hole created by the LHC would be in roughly the same situation as the Sun. It's an enormous object with a massive gravitational pull, yet it's extremely isolated because the Universe is almost entirely empty. It can't even gobble up the relatively minute planets orbiting around it because gravity doesn't work like that. If the LHC were to create a subatomic black hole, whether or not it evaporated - and since this is a highly speculative theory which has already made predictions that don't seem to be correct, nobody was counting on the fact that it would - and assuming this black hole happened to be caught in the Earth's gravitational field so that it ended up in the center of the planet - well, so what?

The gravity of any black hole is infinite, but its mass is finite. And the tinier the mass, the less range that infinite gravity has to reach out and grab things. Consider this. Neutrinos are one of the most common particles in the Universe, yet they do almost nothing, because they respond to none of the known forces other than gravity, which is incredibly weak. Every second, billions of neutrinos, mostly thrown out by the Sun, stream through every cubic inch of your body. If it was any other kind of particle, you'd get such horrific radiation poisoning that you'd probably die before you felt any pain, and quite possibly you'd be soup before you hit the floor. But for a neutrino to affect you in any way, it has to score a direct hit on one of the particles comprising your body - google "neutrino observatory" for an idea of how often that's likely to happen. Same thing with a subatomic black hole. I understand physics well enough to be entirely happy with the LHC creating as many of them as it wants to, assuming that's feasible (which is doubtful), and letting ever single one end up at the Earth's core. Even a trillion of them wouldn't make any difference in the estimated lifetime of the Universe.

Seriously, the problem is that small, assuming that you don't go mental every time somebody mentions buzz-words like "black hole" and "science".

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The problem with science is that people, in general, know so little about it, and are not really interested in learning more. So when you say something like quantum black hole, people associate it with a stellar mass black hole, which they know to be dangerous. (most likely from science fiction)

I am not saying that everybody should become physicists (i am certainly not), but sometimes it would be nice if people read up on a subject before panicking !

This is probably the most extreme example: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7609631.stm

We don't know if Hawking radiation is real or not. In any event if quantum black hole are a reality, they would be produced by cosmic radiation, which is bombarding the earth with much more energy than the LHC could ever provide, and yet we are still here.

As an aside i would like to mention that much of Hawkins work was actually based on the work of Alexei Starobinsky and Yakov Zeldovich. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakov_Zeldovich)

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When I read something beginning with, like, "The greatly overrated Stephen Hawking," I tend to draw negative conclusions about both the knowledge and arrogance of the author. Maybe it's just me.

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When I read something beginning with, like, "The greatly overrated Stephen Hawking," I tend to draw negative conclusions about both the knowledge and arrogance of the author. Maybe it's just me.

I did not in any way intend to belittle Hawkin, i just wanted to show a little appreciation to some of the less well known names in science.

Most of the great scientists in history have based much of their work on others. the true mark of a genius is to take a lot of different information and put them all together in a grand theory.

Newton said it best:

"If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants."

Edited by Noteverythingisaconspiracy
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I did not in any way intend to belittle Hawkin, i just wanted to show a little appreciation to some of the less well known names in science.

Most of the great scientists in history have based much of their work on others. the true mark of a genius is to take a lot of different information and put them all together in a grand theory.

Newton said it best:

"If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants."

The thing is I didn't aim what I posted at you.

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