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Hey skadder - how about some sort of teaser about what you're linking to? I don't as a rule click on links unless I have some idea where they're taking me to. A lot of folks who check Hatrack at work have said the same (can't click on a link to have some inappropriate content or noise pop up...)
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Gotta point this out: The publication date on the article is April 1st. I wouldn't take this one seriously, especially after reading that last paragraph. Posts: 293 | Registered: Apr 2003
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quote: A spokesperson for the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) has confirmed the fears of many in the scientific world after revealing that the reason for the sudden closure of the Large Hadron Collider, the world's most expensive physics experiment, was not due to "technical problems" as previously stated, but because its controversial particle collisions have sensationally rendered a "tiny black hole" in the fabric of space.
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How about making this the prompt for the next challenge? There's so much material in the article...
Posts: 1139 | Registered: May 2008
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I actually worked on a short story where CERN was trying to create a black hole for study. My idea was a nuclear blast inside a shrinking magnetic field. All that energy with nowhere to go but inwards in a sort of mini supernova.
The hook of the story would've been that properly concerned citizens afraid of having a little vacuum of doom in their backyard try to sabotage the experiment and disrupt the containment, nearly destroying CERN.
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Just posted a story idea based on the article. I had it where they would collapse, explode, if they received too much mass at once. It became a weapon for star ship battles. Never knew where story ideas will come from.
Posts: 1008 | Registered: Feb 2006
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I don't find this funny at all. It's things like this that make uneducated people fear and hate science.
Posts: 1271 | Registered: May 2007
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Lol. Does anyone have a firm grip on US politics? I think it's gotten way out of hand. (Anyone alse feel like Romans?)
Posts: 3687 | Registered: Jan 2007
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I know the probability of a micro-black hole forming is immensely small, and that should one form it ought to effectively disappear instantly without any kind of effect because it's too small and, more importantly, traveling too fast.
But that doesn't mean I can't also laugh at the layman humor. Right?
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This scenario is reminiscent of David Brin's 1990 novel, 'Earth'. In it scientists in 2060 accidentally create a microscopic blackhole that escapes into the core of the planet where it starts to eat away at the matter there.
Scientists tracking the escaped blackhole discover that there is in fact an already existing blackhole eating away at the heart of the planet.
The reason a microscopic black hole would disappear nearly instantly is, according to black hole theory, due to spontaneous generation of particle-antiparticle pairs. The idea is that a point in pure space has infinite energy, but that the larger the area (diminishing very quickly), the less energy.
This energy takes shape in the form of particle-antiparticle pairs, which spontaneously generate, collide, and annihilate each other.
Along the event horizon of a black hole, however, one member of the pair could get drawn into the black hole, while the other zips away, blessed with existence. This is how black holes shrink, although for stellar-mass black holes the process is very slow. The smaller the black hole, the quicker the formation of pairs and the dissipation of mass.
I haven't studied it enough to understand exactly why that is, when intuitively it seems like more massive black holes would erode faster, but that's what the theory says. So if you had a black hole with a mass of just a few dozen particles, it would be gone in the blink of an eye.
I think the fear is (whether rational or irrational), that a black hole would encounter mass during the brief instant of its existence and draw that mass into the event horizon, at which point it could sink to the center of the earth and draw everything in, replacing our planet with a cute little black hole.
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Scientists investigating binding forces and properties of black holes and galactic centers are finding evidence of repulsive forces not fully explained by the usual known candidates, like centrifugal forces and photon pressure. One theory presented is that undetected exotic dark matter and dark energy may be contributing to accelerating hyperinflation of the universe, which might suggest that part of the invisible forces may be repulsive gravitational forces wrougt by singularities or undetected exotic dark matter receding from the conventionally accepted time-space continuum.
If possible, conjecture suggests that repulsive gravity has an inversely proportionate effect over distance opposite in relationship to conventional gravity's attraction. The greater the distance, the more the repulsive effect accumulates. Another conjecture suggests that dark energy may be a consequence of pressure from theoretical superluminal tachyon influences. The Big Shred Theory is one area of investigation looking into these troubling possibilities.
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