If CERN Kills Us All, Would We Notice?

[Checkmite]

No; for one thing, the time-dilation is an illusion experienced by people observing from outside the black hole. If we're in the black hole, we don't experience the illusion.

For another thing - the time-dilation IS an illusion, not a real effect. In much the same way that time "seems" to slow down as you approach the speed of light. Time isn't really slowing down; what's happening is that you're outrunning photons (or almost outrunning them), so that they take a longer time to reach your eye than they would've if you were travelling slowly. Thus, the changes in objects that the photons would reflect come to you over a longer period of time, making it seem as if those changes took place slower than they did. Time continues at the same speed it always does.

Same thing. Except in the black hole, it's not you moving faster, it's the photons moving slower as gravity yanks on them.

 

[geni]

The other possibility would be if a black hole was large enough that it survived long enough to eat particles at a greater rate than it evaporated. This would still be a tiny black hole, much smaller than atom, although the exact size needed depends on things like the material it is in. Since by far the biggest influence on the black hole would be the Earth's gravity, it would sink down to the centre of the Earth, where it would go about eating everything down there. Since it would be so small to begin with, the process would probably take millions of years.

You are assumeing that the black hole is traveling at below the escape velocity of the earth.

 

[Gate2501]

You are assumeing that the black hole is traveling at below the escape velocity of the earth.

Yeah!

I thought about this, but figured I was wrong. Even if those gamma rays do form black holes, they would just fly straight through the earth and out the other side into space. Why wouldn't the same sort of thing happen in the LHC?

Would the tiny black hole created have no sort of direction and velocity? If it did would it be enough to just shoot it right off the earth?

I don't know the answers to these questions, but it was one of the first things I thought of. After reading about hawking radiation though, and the Sokolov-Ternov effect & Unruh effect, I am not really worried even if a tiny black hole does form.

Seems like it would go poof.

 

[shadron]

A micro black hole could drift through the whole earth without any interaction with anything. It has to direct hit something to get any interaction. And matter is made up mostly of nothing. (Any atom consists of a very small nucleus and probabilty distribution of electrons in waveform, electrons are NOT small balls in an orbit!) Gravity is a much to weak force at small scales compared to the forces in the nucleus of an atom. And if it get a direct hit on something - big deal - mass goes a little bit up but the reach is still almost zero. It would last longer than 5 billion years (which is the natural end point for earth as the sun gets a red giant) to do anything significant.

OK, allow me to Devil-advocate a bit here, so that I can get rid of my doubts, too.

A micro back hole. As you say, no interaction, or not much. It may evaporate, but if Hawking is wrong, it might not. Now we have a micro black hole in orbit within he earth, which very occasionally hits (and swallows) a nucleus, or maybe only part of one. I see it monotonically increasing in size. Eventually (tens, thousands, millions of years?) it will be getting big enough that it will begin creating physical cavities in things it flies through from tidal forces, and extending its reach. Even neutrinos, the ultimate touch-me-not of particles, occasionally interact.

Finally, I'm not sure about your statement about the weakness of gravity. The force of gravity scales with the inverse of distance, so the force would be greater at small distances, nicht wahr?

As all events of the CERN experiments occur naturally in the upper atmosphere at any given time (and many events with much higher energy than CERN can produce), and in the last 4.5 billion years no detectable black hole has formed on/near earth we can conclude there is no risk to fear.

Yes, they do. The only difference is that if such a cosmic ray event created a black hole it would most likely have a hyperbolic orbit with earth due to it's huge speed, and so, one pass, and it's gone. If such were created at CERN, they would be near zero relative velocity with earth at creation, and therefore would be in elliptical orbit, most all of it below the surface. It is a beautiful example of orbiting point-masses, in effect.

So, tell me what I've missed that will keep me out of a collapsing earth. Is the trump card that the time scale is billions of years for the black hole to grow appreciably? Has someone made that calculation? Is it something else? These ideas have come right out of my head - I don't read the CT sort of sites for this. I'm willing to be bought by Big Science here, but not cheaply. Let's see if the reasoning makes me comfortable (i.e., passes through my engineering-scale BS filters, and perhaps those of others here).

[Some people may recognize this scenario as that from James P. Hogan's book "Thrice Upon A Time". In that book they avoid this problem by send a 50MB message about the belated discovery of what happened back in time to just before the miscreant power plant is started up, and the size of the black holes created there appear to be larger, as well. Too bad we can't depend on that option here.]

 

[Tubbythin]

Imagine every poop atom in your body exploding at the speed of light because a couple brainiac physicists decided to stabilize anti-protons. That's a lot of poopload.

Anti-protons are just as stable as protons. Positrons are just as stable as electrons etc etc.

 

[geni]

If such were created at CERN, they would be near zero relative velocity with earth at creation, and therefore would be in elliptical orbit, most all of it below the surface. It is a beautiful example of orbiting point-masses, in effect.

The LHC is going to be throwing things around at about the speed of light. There is also the issue that black holes can be charge carriers which means that they can be moved via magnetic fields.

 

[TjW]

As I don't have the phone number of LostAngeles I will just post here.
And if this happens you will have plenty of time to run around shouting at the top of your lungs "The world is coming to an end! We are all going to die! Panic! Or do you want to have sex a last time?"
Maybe the tidal forces will s.t..r...e....t.....c......h m.......y p......o........s............t..........!

That's my major question If we have time to plead for sex my worries dissipate almost into nothing

Well, if that's your major concern, why wait til the last minute? You can do that now.

 

[LostAngeles]

As I don't have the phone number of LostAngeles I will just post here.
And if this happens you will have plenty of time to run around shouting at the top of your lungs "The world is coming to an end! We are all going to die! Panic! Or do you want to have sex a last time?"
Maybe the tidal forces will s.t..r...e....t.....c......h m.......y p......o........s............t..........!

The sky was all purple and people running everywhere, trying to run from the destruction. You know, I didn't even care.

 

[69dodge]

For another thing - the time-dilation IS an illusion, not a real effect. In much the same way that time "seems" to slow down as you approach the speed of light. Time isn't really slowing down; what's happening is that you're outrunning photons (or almost outrunning them), so that they take a longer time to reach your eye than they would've if you were travelling slowly. Thus, the changes in objects that the photons would reflect come to you over a longer period of time, making it seem as if those changes took place slower than they did. Time continues at the same speed it always does.

How does your it's-just-an-illusion theory deal with things like the twin paradox? The twins are standing right next to each other, not moving or anything, yet they and everyone else can see that one is younger, simply because he had been moving in the past.

 

[gambling_cruiser]

OK, allow me to Devil-advocate a bit here, so that I can get rid of my doubts, too.

A micro back hole. As you say, no interaction, or not much. It may evaporate, but if Hawking is wrong, it might not. Now we have a micro black hole in orbit within he earth, which very occasionally hits (and swallows) a nucleus, or maybe only part of one. I see it monotonically increasing in size. Eventually (tens, thousands, millions of years?) it will be getting big enough that it will begin creating physical cavities in things it flies through from tidal forces, and extending its reach. Even neutrinos, the ultimate touch-me-not of particles, occasionally interact.

Finally, I'm not sure about your statement about the weakness of gravity. The force of gravity scales with the inverse of distance, so the force would be greater at small distances, nicht wahr?
snip]

Slow moving micro black hole - yes compared to c
The creating particles move faster than .99c, so only only .01 % of that speed is much faster than escape velocity.
Interaction area of a black hole of 2 proton masses is really small.
Gravity has to go against strong nuclear force to pull a nucleon from a nucleus.
The strong force is about 10 e36 times stronger than gravity.
Therefore the only chance for such a small black hole to grow is to directly hit a nucleon. This is the reason i wrote that the sun becoming a red giant is faster than the growth of a micro black hole. See also BAUT discussion.

 

[Cuddles]

You are assumeing that the black hole is traveling at below the escape velocity of the earth.

True. But if they're travelling faster than the escape velocity there's really not much to worry about, since they'll escape.

A micro back hole. As you say, no interaction, or not much. It may evaporate, but if Hawking is wrong, it might not. Now we have a micro black hole in orbit within he earth, which very occasionally hits (and swallows) a nucleus, or maybe only part of one. I see it monotonically increasing in size. Eventually (tens, thousands, millions of years?) it will be getting big enough that it will begin creating physical cavities in things it flies through from tidal forces, and extending its reach. Even neutrinos, the ultimate touch-me-not of particles, occasionally interact.

If black holes don't evaporate then it would basically be the same as the scenario I outlined in my last post. To start with, a black hole is not going to orbit, at least not for very long. It will be created with a certain amount of momentum, but everything it eats will be essentially stationary, so the bigger the black hole gets, the smaller its orbit will be. Since the hole will only be a subatomic mass to start with, it will only take eating a few atoms to increase its mass so much that it no longer orbits and simply sinks to the centre of the Earth, at which point it's not eating cavities you need to worry about, it's the Earth collapsing in on itself.

Yes, they do. The only difference is that if such a cosmic ray event created a black hole it would most likely have a hyperbolic orbit with earth due to it's huge speed, and so, one pass, and it's gone.

Why would a black hole created by a cosmic ray have a huge velocity? Most cosmic rays are things like electrons, muons and gamma rays. If one of them hits something as big as an atomic nucleus, the velocity of the product will be very low.

So, tell me what I've missed that will keep me out of a collapsing earth. Is the trump card that the time scale is billions of years for the black hole to grow appreciably? Has someone made that calculation? Is it something else?

The trump card is simply that it's not going to happen. The LHC is not capable of producing black holes that will eat the Earth in any time period, not even billions of years. It has been speculated that it may be possible to produce tiny black holes in particle collisions, but the LHC is not special here and would be no more dangerous than any other accelerator. However, even the possibility is pure speculation and is not supported with any evidence whatsoever.

The LHC is going to be throwing things around at about the speed of light. There is also the issue that black holes can be charge carriers which means that they can be moved via magnetic fields.

The LHC throws things around at the speed of light, but the collisions have zero momentum since they involve two things of equal mass and velocity colliding head on. This has to be the case, since otherwise the products of the collision would carry on travelling at high speed and be very difficult to measure.

 

[MattusMaximus]

If that's a joke about Americans, I will sue your ass off.

Yes, but the real question is: Will you sue him in England?

Okay, back to the thread now...

 

[Beerina]

In the book "Moving Mars", I think, they estimate a black hole dropped into the Earth would have to be about 1cm in diameter, or else that Hawking radiation would eat it away faster than it could inhale even the dense matter at the core of the Earth.

But if it was 1cm or so or larger, it would grow very quickly, so we probably wouldn't have more than a few seconds before death.


Also, I read somewhere that a very large black hole (solar-system sized) could suck you through the event horizon without you being torn apart by tidal forces, but a small one that was Earth-mass sized, probably a few hundred yards or so, would completely rip you apart because you'd weigh tons more at your feet then at your head, and that increased gravity would accelerate your feet down so fast your atoms would rip apart from each other.

So, assuming all those stories "did their math", a black hole large enough to threaten the Earth is completely impossible for the LHC or any conceivable machine in the near or medium future.


But that's not the only theoretical threat from the LHC. More ominous is the threat of creating a strange, lower-energy, relatively stable form of matter that, like a catalyst or oxygen for a fire, is capable of tranforming nearby normal matter into it. This cascades out of control and the whole Earth suffers a complete destructive catastrophe. Depending on how much energy the conversion releases, some outer parts of Earth may be blown away before they could be converted, but don't expect to survive the explosion, and if you did, your little lump of Earth won't have any air for you to breathe anyway, and god knows where it's headed relative to the sun even if you did.


The argument this won't happen for any cyclotrons in development is that the upper atmosphere and other planets and moons are impacted by far higher energy particles all the time, yet they all still exist.

This is, of course, an odd statement, given scientists are claiming these colliders release energies and temps greater than anywhere, including the core of stars or supernova explosions, except for the first few moments after the Big Bang.

Then again there is the "Wow" particle, a particle travelling so fast that it's mass was that of a bacteria. IIRC, this is also far in excess of anything the LHC is capable of doing, and these things hit the planets and stars, too, with no sudden vaporizations.

 

[MattusMaximus]

No; for one thing, the time-dilation is an illusion experienced by people observing from outside the black hole. If we're in the black hole, we don't experience the illusion.

Actually, time dilation has nothing to do with a conscious observer. It is an observed fact that unstable particles (such as muons) have a longer lifetime when they are measured to be moving at 0.99c. I have my high school students perform an experiment which confirms this, and scientists down the road at FermiLab do this all the time in particle accelerators.

Of course, the kind of time dilation I'm speaking of here is due to special relativity. The time dilation due to black holes is a gravitational effect which is in the realm of general relativity.

But the same effect takes place on the Earth. Take GPS receivers and their satellite hookups, for instance. Since the electronics involved in these systems are so high speed, then calculations of time must be very precise. It ends up that gravitational time dilation causes time to pass just a wee bit slower on Earth's surface than in geosynchronous orbit where the GPS satellites rest. In order to make sure the electronic calculations work out, you must account for this time dilation - otherwise, your GPS receiver wouldn't work.

Does this still qualify as your definition of an "illusion"?

For another thing - the time-dilation IS an illusion, not a real effect. In much the same way that time "seems" to slow down as you approach the speed of light. Time isn't really slowing down; what's happening is that you're outrunning photons (or almost outrunning them), so that they take a longer time to reach your eye than they would've if you were travelling slowly. Thus, the changes in objects that the photons would reflect come to you over a longer period of time, making it seem as if those changes took place slower than they did. Time continues at the same speed it always does.

No, you're wrong. You're making the same mistake that classical physicists did in the 19th century: you are assuming that there is a fundamental & absolute frame of reference for the measurement of time. Yet all experiments performed to date show this to be untrue.

If you define "real" by what can be measured, then yes time dilation is a real effect in nature. If you're using a different philosophical definition of "real", then you're posting in the wrong thread - try Philosophy & Religion instead.

I ask you this: if you really believe that an absolute frame of reference for time exists, how would you measure it? Any temporal measurement you make, whether it be using a clock, subatomic decay, biological aging, etc, is subject to the laws of time dilation.

Same thing. Except in the black hole, it's not you moving faster, it's the photons moving slower as gravity yanks on them.

Wrong again. Photons do not change their speed - regardless of the conditions or the observer, they travel at c = 3x10⁸ m/sec in a vacuum. Again, this is a fact that has been experimentally confirmed numerous times and it forms the basis of all relativity theory. What happens with a black hole is that as the photon attempts to climb out of the gravity well, it must lose energy but cannot slow down. The way a photon loses its energy in this case is to have its wavelength stretched out, thereby decreasing its frequency and energy. This effect is known as a gravitational redshift - and yes, it is also an experimentally confirmed fact.

 

[MattusMaximus]

Btw, the best Sci-Fi treatment I ever saw of what would happen with a planet-eating black hole was an old episode of Stargate SG1, season 2, ep. 16 titled "A Matter of Time".

Except for the usual wormhole/stargate fantasy stuff, it's a pretty fair treatment of what would happen near a massive black hole.

 

[Beausoleil]

The argument this won't happen for any cyclotrons in development is that the upper atmosphere and other planets and moons are impacted by far higher energy particles all the time, yet they all still exist.

Except that the products of these reactions are moving at very large velocities relative to the Earth and have little chance to interact with our planet, which is not true at CERN.

Or so I read somewhere.

 

[Cuddles]

But that's not the only theoretical threat from the LHC. More ominous is the threat of creating a strange, lower-energy, relatively stable form of matter that, like a catalyst or oxygen for a fire, is capable of tranforming nearby normal matter into it. This cascades out of control and the whole Earth suffers a complete destructive catastrophe. Depending on how much energy the conversion releases, some outer parts of Earth may be blown away before they could be converted, but don't expect to survive the explosion, and if you did, your little lump of Earth won't have any air for you to breathe anyway, and god knows where it's headed relative to the sun even if you did.

Well firstly, what exactly do you mean by "lower-energy form of matter"? This doesn't really make sense. However, it sounds a bit like you're talking about the idea of strangelets - hadrons containing strange quarks that could convert the quarks in other particles to strange quarks as well. This is really no different from the black hole scenario though. It requires the creation of a particle that converts other particles faster than it decays, and has exactly the same problems as the black hole, except that we don't even have any evidence that strange quarks would actually do this in the first place.

The argument this won't happen for any cyclotrons in development is that the upper atmosphere and other planets and moons are impacted by far higher energy particles all the time, yet they all still exist.

Synchrotrons, not cyclotrons.

This is, of course, an odd statement, given scientists are claiming these colliders release energies and temps greater than anywhere, including the core of stars or supernova explosions, except for the first few moments after the Big Bang.

No they aren't. Scientists claim that colliders create temperatures equal to just after the big bang, they don't claim that this never happens anywhere else. That would be a pretty stupid thing to claim given that we know there are particles with far higher energy thanwe can produce flying around hitting things all the time. The important different between the particles in colliders and ones in the wild is that it's much easier to study them, since we know exactly where they are.

 

[TX50]

In the book "Moving Mars", I think, they estimate a black hole dropped into the Earth would have to be about 1cm in diameter...

This is probably a dumbass question but what might such a thing actually
look like (disregarding gravitic effects except where they affect its physical
appearance)? Would it be just a small black sphere?

 

[Tubbythin]

Except that the products of these reactions are moving at very large velocities relative to the Earth and have little chance to interact with our planet, which is not true at CERN.

Or so I read somewhere.

What makes you think the reaction cross section will decrease with increasing kinetic energy?

 

[ElMondoHummus]

Oh, good God... sorry to send the thread off at a tangent, but did you know the LHC is really going to be Satan's stargate?

The large Hadron Collider may be a lot more sinister than has already been percieved. The LHC may be capable of making a hole in the Van Allen Belt. The Van Allen Belt protects the Earth from Cosmic rays. It also stops any living creature from leaving or entering the Earth. The LHC is a doorway for the return of Satan himself.

Well, if Satan can get in, so can Loki, right? We can have an all Personification-of-Entropy Showdown! Who else is invited?

[/woo]



Okay, look, all joking aside, the man in that video is just bloody wacko. Where the hell to these folks get these delusions? He asks "How have I reached such an incredible conclusion"? Well, it's because you're flippin' insane!!! And OMG... his misunderstanding of black holes is just so far off, it's painful. I'm not a physicist and even I see where he's getting it wrong.

Speaking of collapsars, this man is sort of an intellectual black hole himself - once past his event horizon, no discernible intelligence ever comes back out.

Oi. Anyway, if you had some brain cells you wanted to get rid of, feel free to watch the video.