CERN Collider Collision May Create Black Hole That Destroys Us... Or not...

"Hola!" (...In honor of my Madre, who is learning Espanol.)

I stumbled upon the following article... The title alone is enough to make one want to... well, uh... never mind.

Let's just agree that it's excessive and, in all honesty, belongs on the cover of one of those grocery checkout rags with their stories of hybrid dog-boys and perpetual celebrity deathbeds... not The Boston Globe.

I believe that the author of the article chose to use that title because it lays out in the open a very real fear that a fair number of people have regarding an upcoming scientific experiment that involves smashing two protons together at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland.

Those people who are feeling various degrees of fear and dread about the event are concerned because - in smashing the protons and releasing their bits and pieces - due to Einstein's E=mc{+2} - one could theorize that a large amount of mass in a little space could result a black hole.

That would be bad... and not just for Switzerland and France.

The author offers several logical-sounding reasons in an effort to debunk the belief that the experiment might result in the creation of black holes, saying such thoughts are completely 'irrational'.

... These rebuttals include the 'argument' that... well, basically that there's no reason to fear the creation of black holes because... (drum roll, please) Black Holes still only exist in theory... They aren't REAL.

... Whoa, wait a minute... he's right! No one has ever brought one into the classroom in a brown paper bag for 'Show-and-Tell'...

You've got be kidding me!

If Black Holes don't exist (and I'm not insisting that they do)... well, then, NASA and numerous other people with access to the most powerful telescopes known to humankind have been wasting a lot of time mapping them and announcing each new one discovered.

The author's first couple of arguments might have been somewhat re-assuring to a few people... even to me.

But, when he offered up the 'Silly people...Black Holes are only theoretical' argument as a reason that we should not worry that some whack-a-doo scientists - who obviously have yet to learn that: "Just because you can do something... doesn't mean that you should!" (Like the transgenic-obsessed idiots who make small furry animals that glow in the dark.) - ... that was when I started to both laugh and really worry.

May those CERN (Mad) Scientists decide not to tempt The Fates in such a foolish endeavor... (Hey, if "it happens everyday, all around us..." as the author claims... Why re-create it in a large collider?)
... Or, may they fail fabulously... for all of our sakes.

* If those of us who are concerned about things like this are labeled 'irrational'... so be it...
I'd rather be called irrational, err on the side of caution and Live... than be conceited, 'rational' and possibly cause the obliteration of everything.

Peace.
L.

P.S.- Then again, I might just be tired... Buenos Noches!


From: The Boston Globe

Ask Dr. Knowledge

Will New Collider Create Black Holes That Destroy Us All?
(insert heavy sarcasm)

April 21, 2008


The Large Hadron Collider is a particle accelerator collider being built at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, or CERN, straddling the French-Swiss border near Geneva. It should be completed and ready to start producing data sometime this summer. In it, scientists will be able to smash protons travelling at more than 99.99 percent of the speed of light with protons traveling in the opposite direction at the same speed.

Protons are actually pretty complicated objects, made of little bits and pieces, and in a collision of two protons it can happen that two of the little pieces find themselves very close together. Those pieces carry a lot of energy, and due to Einstein's E=mc{+2} one might imagine that a lot of mass in a little space could lead to a black hole.

The odds of this actually happening are pretty much zero for several reasons. First of all, the theorists who worry about such things happening make assumptions that the energy needed to make a black hole is vastly less than what we would expect in the real world as we know it. This possibility only arises in theories with what are called "large extra dimensions," and there is no evidence at all that these describe reality.

A second reason: Black holes, strictly speaking, are theoretical constructs. Nobody has ever seen a black hole. Things that are black hole candidates are objects which are known to be small and to have very high masses, but if one is very honest, there are a lot of problems with the black hole concept, and we don't yet know for sure that they really exist. One particularly vexing problem is that time is predicted to slow down as one approaches a heavy object, so that bits of matter falling into a heavy collapsing object actually take an infinite amount of time to fall in from the point of view of an observer outside.

A third reason is that while we physicists are all excited about the collisions to take place at CERN soon, such collisions take place all the time on Earth, the moon, and everywhere else due to ultrahigh energy cosmic rays. In other words, the experiments people worry about at CERN have been going on now and then at random all over the place for billions of years, and things seem to be fine!

Dr. Knowledge is written by physicists Stephen Reucroft and John Swain, both of Northeastern University. E-mail questions to drknowledge@globe.com or write Dr. Knowledge, c/o The Boston Globe, PO Box 55819, Boston, MA 02205-5819.