The End Of The World (Honestly!)

You never know, especially with 'experimental science'. If too many of those strange morons got free and partnered up with the zillions of "free radicals" that are already running loose on the planet ... GOD ONLY KNOWS ... what might happen

Wow.. I saw the link friday on some obscure section of MSNBC

But now I see this:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/29/sc...llider.html?hp

Front page feature story on the NYT. and I thought wowsers... front page material now!

Very interesting stuff.

Fellows

We are barbarians and we will wipe ourselves out eventually. I personally don't mind dying to a cosmic catastrophy, it sounds nice.

Seriously though, why is this more dangerous than nano technology which everyone and their grandmother has access to?

If you recollect the Bill Joy article
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html
You will note the fact that the US government is spending about 1.4 billion on trying to figure out if there is really any defense.
http://www.nano.gov/html/facts/faqs.html

With private players in critical technology areas, it is a wide open market for dangerous technology.

I've got the solution: Move that big thing to Mars and do the experiment there.

Simple!

I guess if it actually happened it would be so fast no one would notice. How long does it take a micro-black hole to swallow a planet?

what if the martians already had that idea first & are the ones doing it on earth in the first place?



what if we're already inside one?

that's it... i need some sleep!

It would probably take a good few years. We wouldn't even know it was there unless we went looking for it with tech we don't really have integrated yet. The last 1/3 of a second or so would be quite exciting. Just about the time your nerves from your feet told your brain something was going on you would go out in a blaze of gamma ray glory. Exponential growth curves are funny like that.

What makes you think it will grow exponentially? It's a complex problem. The black hole will try to evaporate while at the same time try to bring mass into the event horizon. I call Stephen Hawkins as an expert witness!

Astrophysicist David Brin went over it in his SF novel "Earth" which was exactly that story thread about micro black holes slipping into the interior of the Earth. Hawking would more or less agree if it could be shown the micro-hole would consume more mater than it lost to virtual particle radiation, something that is actually possible if the micro-hole was in the core of the planet rather than in deep space.

My wee bit of Wiki reading tells me that the micro black hole is more bright than a star sized one. I'm sure someone already did the math to know the half life of a two, three or four proton mass micro black hole. How else would you know what to look for in your collider?

The event horizon is likely to remain small -- the only way it could consume the entirety of the planet is through some (self-destructive and slowing) oscillation process... Regardless, the gravity at my feet would be no different than it is today -- black holes don't have stronger gravity -- it is just within the Swartzchild radius (which is really tiny even for an earth size black hole) nothing can escape...

And none of this is considering the reaction (so to speak) cross section of the black hole as it is passing through earth...

Just speaking speculatively, I would think it would go straight down to our core and stay put in the gravitational center of the earth. At that point I guess it could gobble up all the molten iron in the core, but after that is all gone, wouldn't the mantle hold in place and create a huge enormous cavern with the singularity in the center for eons? I mean that would be terrifying to think about; all tectonic activity would come to a slow halt and the magnetic field protecting the planet would go away, and those are two major things off the top of my head.

Out of an accelerator the micro black hole would have some initial velocity that would determine its orbit around and/or through the earth. What the angular distribution would be I can't guess. I will guess that it will always have escape velocity because most of the stuff from accelerators comes out at around the speed of light. And I would guess a 50/50 chance of going "up" and not "down" and fly away to go bother someone else??

The question is can accumulate enough mass in the time that it's around the earth to not evaporate and also not escape from the earth.


Show your work

Um, well that isn't physically possible...

If you dropped the black hole from the surface it would accelerate towards and passed the center of the earth ... if you included the mass it was acquiring on its way, the acceleration would be slowed but it should not be non-existent since a femtogram even a hundreth of an angstrom from the center of gravity of an object should oscillate through that object if it has no force preventing it from doing so...


of course on it's way out it's motion is dampened... the black hole would eventually settle in the center of mass...

as for gobbling anything... once it is in the center of mass the only things it would 'gobble' would have to have had some velocity towards it to begin with... there is no swallowing of the mass around it randomly... an inertial black hole could sit perfectly happily in an inertial sphere of iron as long as the sphere was able to support its OWN mass in the gravitational field... add a bit of water and oxygen, though...

huh? 50/50?

it is coming out parallel to the earths surface since most accelerators are built in perfect planes... it should, if it has enough velocity fly off of the earth...

now, as for how much mass it would accumulate... that depends upon a large number of factors including its charge density, angular momentum (black holes have a theoretical limit to how fast they can rotate), assuming these factors are negligible one would only need to calculate the probability of intersection of the event horizon of some radius comes within the radius of subatomic particles on it's way out -- this is what I referred to as the cross section of the reaction...

i suspect that the incumbent black hole wouldn't be...

50/50 because when things "scatter" they can scatter in any direction. But the distribution of the scattering angle is a matter for physicist to figure out. Given two proton beams coming at each other half the stuff scatters "up"ish and half scatters "down"ish. It's actually evenly distributed around the beam line. That's why the detectors are cylinders capped with detectors.


It's charge density is irrelevant because it's a black hole. The electromagnetic force is carried by the photon and photons cannot get out of a black hole. I'm going to guess that micro black holes are best formed by an over all neutral partials. It probably doesn't matter that much because the EM force is so much smaller compared to the others.

You're right about the cross section of the event horizon. But that's simple math that's already been worked out. It's basically "this ball is traveling though this distribution of points, what the cross section of interaction". Where the points are all of protons, neutrons and electrons that make up the earth.

The more I think about it the more I think this cannot happen. If the mass density of the stuff we already know about is not high enough to make a black hole then anything that's smashed together cannot either. The wave function of the resulting particle would have to be incredibly confined. So it has to be massive and small. If the wave function extends outside the event horizon .... what does that mean? Hum?

Can mass in a black hole quantum tunnel out of a black hole? Why not? Is that what Hawking proved? But his was related to virtual particles created near the EH. Hum?

If micro black holes do exist, they're probably already existing all over the place. That's right there is Splinemodel's corollary of inevitability. Best addition to physics ever.

um... black holes don't scatter...


wrong (all wrong). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charged_black_hole .

unlike some people on this forum, i don't talk out of my ass...

another way of looking at this charged black hole thing is that an imbalance is created in the charge in the universe and the black hole thus has an effective charge is equal to the exact charge of its components... all those positive charges left behind when a bunch of electrons collapse into a black hole still are emitting photons...


great... who cares if it has been worked out already? (and your wrong about the simplicity of the calculation because you are ignoring the quantum mechanical nature of electrons, protons and neutrons -- and all of these do in fact tunnel significantly) it's not like you are proposing anything new here at all...


again, the first part is wrong... the second part cannot be answered with current theories because general relativity and quantum mechanics are not compatible... see the wikipedia article on electron as a black hole -- there may be good physics in this thought experiment, but that remains to be seen... more to the point, imagine if you will, that the black hole itself is small enough to have a significant tunneling radius...


No that was not what hawking proved at all...

as far as mass tunneling out of a black hole -- it is highly improbable using conventional QM with an electron in a black hole potential well...

What the fuck do you think a particle accelerator does? It collides and scatters particles. You know like Compton scattering or maybe Rutherford scattering? And if a micro black hole is created it will also scatter away. You think it's just going to sit there? Read a physics book!



Yea neither am I. So please tell me how the photons emitted inside the black hole .... get out? A black hole cannot emit photons past the EV. BUT photons can be emitted near the EV and not fall into the BH. DUH!



Yea it's a basic stat's mechanics problem from undergrad physics. I think I did it once. Can you tell me that an electron can QM tunnel out of a BH? I don't know. But I've never read of it.




Who cares it just fun speculation which you ruin by being a dick.





Did you see the "?" I put on that. So if positron electron pair has the positron fall into the EV and the electron escape is that the same mathematically as an electron QM tunneling out of a black hole? How would you know the difference?



Go read a physics book instead of reading wikis. You might learn something more than how to ruin fun threads.

hmm, wiki reference... you should really take your own advice and read a physics text (or at least think, for all of our sake)...

once created that thar black hole will travel in a path affected only by gravity, the momenta of the objects that cross its event horizon, and it's charge...


um... you clearly don't understand a word i am saying... too bad. one thing i will ask you to remember is that the universe is neutrally charged... and the other thing... black holes release gravitons... in other words, static fields appear to be different than moving fields in general relativity...



it's a stat mech problem assuming hard spheres with finite dimentions... sorry... but you probably didn't do this in undergrad...

What does an electron tunneling out of a black hole have to do with anything?


as opposed to being cerebrally impaired...hmm...



you wouldn't and it wouldn't make a difference -- if the mathematical descriptions are the same, the physical reality is well described either way. any person who has taken any advanced physics courses should understand that the maths are just a description as opposed to a physical reality...



you might do well to not be combative when someone points out that you are wrong...

oh and maybe, just maybe use that chunk of tissue at the end of your neck once in a while...

This thread's gone down the crapper...