black holes

[makemeknowit]

i heard that in CERN they are going to try and create a black hole but if it goes tits up then were all doomed, any ideas if they will make it a success or not risk it

[kempie]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Coll ider

[jake-the-peg]

The LHC will go live this year despite a b@lls up by guys at Fermi-lab supplying a part that ripped itself apart when a "quench test" was run.

The black hole business started when someone started talking about the possibility of the LHC being able to create the sort of micro black holes predicted to have been created at the begining of the universe. There was a stage when everbody was looking for these as if they could be found to be evaporating off it'd be a confirmation of "Hawking radiation" - I don't think any one ever found one so the prospect that one could be created at CERN was quite exciting.

Then the press heard about it and ran a buch of ill-informed stories and CERN had to scramble the PR brigade to reassure everybody that they were not actually going to destroy the Earth.

Unfortunately when people hear the term "Black hole" they think "giant stellar vacuum cleaner". But that ignores the fact that the actual mass in a classic black hole comes from an entire star - a micro black hole would be a very different beast indeed.

And the icing on the cake is that there are already collisions going on in the upper atmosphere from cosmic rays many times more powerful than planned at CERN.

Still mud sticks and TV shows like Horizon ( what happened to them? they used to be so good!) need ratings so it all gets dragged out again.

Incidently for a while it was seriously considerred whether electrons might be micro black holes but I think that idea has been abandoned

[China Doll]

Erm... not to sound completely ignorant but I will.... Why would you want to re-create a black hole in micro form?

And also... There are electrons in Radiotherapy. Not knowing an awful lot about electrons, would they be considered as they same type that might have been thought of as little black holes?

(Sorry, more questions but seems silly to start another thread on the same subject).

[kempie]

The production of micro black holes is not an aim of the LHC. They are a theoretical by-product.

Yet to be officially confirmed by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), a new calendar is expected to be published on 22nd June, when the CERN Council meet, which should indicate that an engineer run will not occur before the annual winter shutdown of the site. Therefore the LHC will not go live until spring 2008.

[jake-the-peg]

The reason that micro-black holes are interesting is that Stephen Hawking famously predicted that black holes should slowly evaporate. However testing that is pretty much impossible with an astronomical black hole. If you could create a micro black hole it should evaporate very quickly and we could see if this was true or false and we'd learn quite a bit about some quite important stuff to do with how the Universe is stitched together.

But as Kempie says that's not actually what the LHC at CERN is trying to do. They're looking for the Higgs particle. This is a particle which is predicted to explain why all the others have mass.

When this experiment was looking for funding the Science Minister William Waldegrave set a competition to explain on a side of A4 "What is the Higgs particle and why should we want to find it" the prize was a case of champagne.

The winner used the analogy of the Margaret Thatcher walking through a cocktail party with hangers on temporarily sticking to her.

As for electrons there are uncountable billions of them every atom contains them. Although they have an infinitessimal mass they have no physical size or at least not that we can measure.

For anybody interested here's a neat although moderately technical explanation of why an electron is probably not a black hole

http://physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae191 .cfm