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Large Hadron Collider feedback needed

1) Reality Check mentioned the blog with the topic “The LHC, Black Holes, and You”. (He posted this 5/28. I can’t post URLs yet, so scroll up and use his.) The most interesting thing in that blog is the reification of some quite crude accretion calculations. As a demonstration of their crudity, two respondents already disagree. I do agree that accretion is important here, and I have already mentioned the assertion that accretion will take forever. Accretion depends a lot on the model, a model of something we have never seen, so we need to vet alternate models. For example, Bondi formulas for accretion are obviously inadequate at this scale. Both Plaga and Rossler have presented models, different from each other, in which accretion of Earth takes four years. I do not claim that either is accurate, but if not, it would seem wise to refute them and any other plausible models that take a short time before firing up the collider.

2) BenBurch writes:

>James Blodgett, your refutal (sic) of the Cosmic Ray proof is hilariously flawed.

>There is a ZERO asymmetry between the particles because of relativity. You have to analyze all this >in terms of relativistic frames. When you do that, the conditions are precisely similar.

BenBurch is wrong. Physicist Greg Landsberg made the same mistake a few years ago in an email debate with me. He was smart enough to quickly see that he was wrong.

I agree that, from the relativistic frame of the center of motion of the colliding particles, a cosmic ray collision and a collider collision are identical. If both are otherwise similar, and if a black hole forms in one, a black hole should form in the other. However, the issue here is the motion of the resulting black hole in the rest frame of Earth. We have an inelastic collision, in one case between a particle at rest and a particle at rapid motion in the rest frame of Earth, in the other case between two particles with equal momentum in opposite directions in the rest frame of Earth. Do the math.

3) In the spirit of the great unveiling of my secret identity as James Tankersley, I have discovered another great truth. It is impossible for humans to be simultaneously as smart and as stupid as demonstrated here. Therefore, collider advocates must be space aliens. Their motivation is obvious. Since the H-bomb didn’t work soon enough, they are now on Plan B. [Due to high ambient stupidity, I guess I need to spell it out: THIS IS A JOKE.]
 
Son, I'm not wrong, you are. If Landsberg DID admit that, and you are not lying, then he was in error. The motion of the particle in the rest frame of earth is also an error because cosmic rays come at all angles and energies, and sometimes collide with EACH OTHER, resulting in a low velocity with respect to earth.

Honestly, have you ever studied any real physics?

EDIT: and the CR-CR collisions would occur everywhere throughout space, and space would be absolutely filthy with little black holes if your premise had any validity.
 
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I'm not a physicist or a scientist, but I wanted to share what a scientist (but also not a physicist) friend of mine said to me to make me stop worrying about the LHC. Not that I was worrying much. Basically, he pointed out that the gravitational force exerted by a body doesn't depend on the density of that body, but on the mass of it, and that if the LHC creates a black hole, it can only do it by moving around mass that's already there, which means they can't really create something with a monstrous gravitational force, like what we think of when we think of a black hole.

Is all of this correct? Is any of this correct? It worked on me, but as I said, I'm just a lay person.

BenBurch said:
There is actually some buzz in the science press about a theory that ALL particles are really tiny black holes.
Click to expand...

I hope this is true. I would feel pretty cool knowing that I was made up of umpty zillion black holes. The feeling would only be slightly diminished by knowing that Everything Else was made of the same stuff...
 
linusrichard, basically correct. The mass of the resulting black hole will be miniscule, and if black hole evaporation is correct, then it is gone in an instant, and if the all-particles-are-black-holes people are correct it becomes some other elementary particle.

But one or the other has to be correct because we see no primordial quantum black holes and as I pointed out cosmic rays colliding with each other and other matter in space would churn out microscopic black holes all the time, and they clearly do not persist and grow into planetary mass black holes or we'd see almost nothing else in the Universe. Assuming we were even here to wonder about it.
 
James Blodgett said:
However, the issue here is the motion of the resulting black hole in the rest frame of Earth. We have an inelastic collision, in one case between a particle at rest and a particle at rapid motion in the rest frame of Earth, in the other case between two particles with equal momentum in opposite directions in the rest frame of Earth. Do the math.
Click to expand...

Giddings and Mangano did this math. Didn't you?
 
James Blodgett said:
The most interesting thing in that blog is the reification of some quite crude accretion calculations.
Click to expand...

Have you calculated how long it will take for the earth to fall off the backs of those turtles if the LHC isn't started? After all, I have a model (it's turtles all the way down) that says if we don't start it up, the turtle on the bottom will get impatient and run away.

With the delay there's already been, we should focus all our efforts on getting the LHC started as quickly as possible!!
 
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sol invictus said:
Have you calculated how long it will take for the earth to fall off the backs of those turtles if the LHC isn't started? After all, I have a model (it's turtle's all the way down) that says if we don't start it up, the turtle on the bottom will get impatient and run away.
Click to expand...

Turtles don't run!
 
arthwollipot said:
Heh. Did you see the guy on the Daily Show who said that the possiblity of a catastrophe was 50%? After all, either it will happen, or it won't happen. Therefore, 50%.

John Oliver's reply was "I don't think probability works like that..."
Click to expand...

Truely an amazing moment in science...

watch here
http://www.hulu.com/watch/70918/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-large-hadron-collider

he starts about 2:24 although the whole thing is very good.

the name is Walter wagner.
 
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So, I have a proton and another proton and then they make a black hole.

Hmmm... that is a big black hole and a huge event horizon. I am scared, if I was an electron.
 
1) BenBurch writes:

>James Blodgett, your refutal (sic) of the Cosmic Ray proof is hilariously flawed.

>There is a ZERO asymmetry between the particles because of relativity. You have to analyze all this >in terms of relativistic frames. When you do that, the conditions are precisely similar.

BenBurch is wrong. Physicist Greg Landsberg made the same mistake a few years ago in an email debate with me. He was smart enough to see quickly that he was wrong.

BenBurch is partly right. I agree that, from the relativistic frame of the center of motion of the colliding particles, a cosmic ray collision and a collider collision are identical. If both are otherwise similar, and if a black hole forms in one, a black hole will form in the other. However, the issue here is the motion of the resulting black hole in the rest frame of Earth. We have an inelastic collision, (inelastic because a Schwarzschild barrier forms) in one case between a particle at rest and a particle at rapid motion in the rest frame of Earth, in the other case between two particles with equal momentum in opposite directions in the rest frame of Earth. Do the math.

“sol invictus,” in the second post in this blog dated May 25, does appear to get this.


2) Reality Check mentioned the blog with the topic “The LHC, Black Holes, and You”. (I can’t post URLs yet, so scroll up and use his. He posted this 5/28.) The most interesting thing in that blog is the reification of some rather crude accretion calculations, indeed the calculations and formula are not shown so that we can check, only a rough description of the method and the results. As a demonstration of the crudity of these ”calculations,” two respondents to that blog already disagree. I do agree that accretion is important here, and I have already mentioned the assertion of some collider advocates that accretion will take forever. Accretion depends a lot on the model, a model of something we have never seen, so we need to vet alternative models. For example, Bondi formulas for accretion are obviously inadequate at this scale. Both Rossler and another physicist have developed models, different from each other, in which accretion of Earth takes four years. I do not claim that either is accurate, but if not, it would seem wise to refute them and any other plausible models that project a short time to accrete Earth before firing up the collider. I would love to see a good accretion seminar with a red and a blue team, with the blue team trying to show safety and the red team checking that result, with good physicists on both sides. This has been recommended as a method for vetting scientific global risk issues by both Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal of England, and physicist Francesco Calogero [Author of “"Might a laboratory experiment destroy planet Earth?" Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 25, 191-202 (Autumn 2000). The “laboratory experiment” here is an earlier collider.] Collider advocates are so confident of their results without red team/blue team methodology that they have never considered actually using it.

Folks here have cited Giddings and Mangano, currently the best collider advocate paper on the black hole side of the issue. (G & M do not consider strangelets, also of concern.) Mangano was one of the few collider advocates who gave serious consideration to opposing viewpoints. We should be discussing accretion, and other collider risks and safety factors, on this level, especially things that have been proposed since Giddings and Mangano. To be realistic, we may not have the time or the competence to do a good job of that here. Does anyone have the time and the competence and the willingness to explain things and consider alternatives for a serious seminar on this issue? I am not sure that I do, but I might, and I might be able to assemble others given serious people and a serious venue, here or probably better elsewhere. If you are interested contact me. If anyone can think of a serious sponsor that would be great, but no sponsor is necessary, we could do it ad hoc at something like Yahoo Groups. I won’t post my email here, but Google “Risk Evaluation Forum”, there is contact information there.
 
James Blodgett said:
1) “2) Reality Check mentioned the blog with the topic “The LHC, Black Holes, and You”. (I can’t post URLs yet, so scroll up and use his. He posted this 5/28.) The most interesting thing in that blog is the reification of some rather crude accretion calculations, indeed the calculations and formula are not shown so that we can check, only a rough description of the method and the results. As a demonstration of the crudity of these ”calculations,” two respondents to that blog already disagree. I do agree that accretion is important here, and I have already mentioned the assertion of some collider advocates that accretion will take forever. Accretion depends a lot on the model, a model of something we have never seen, so we need to vet alternative models. For example, Bondi formulas for accretion are obviously inadequate at this scale. Both Rossler and another physicist have developed models, different from each other, in which accretion of Earth takes four years. I do not claim that either is accurate, but if not, it would seem wise to refute them and any other plausible models that project a short time to accrete Earth before firing up the collider. I would love to see a good accretion seminar with a red and a blue team, with the blue team trying to show safety and the red team checking that result, with good physicists on both sides. This has been recommended as a method for vetting scientific global risk issues by both Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal of England, and physicist Francesco Calogero [Author of “"Might a laboratory experiment destroy planet Earth?" Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 25, 191-202 (Autumn 2000). The “laboratory experiment” here is an earlier collider.] Collider advocates are so confident of their results without red team/blue team methodology that they have never considered actually using it.
Click to expand...

You are right - corespondents on The LHC, Black Holes and You do disagree. The basic point is that using a classical model gives 3 trillion years. Other models give other values. The models are not "crude" as you think - they are different.

You missed the basic point. The lifetime of white dwarf stars places a constraint on the time that it takes hypothetical micro-black holes to consume a body. This restricts the time scale to billions of years.
This is a physical observation - not a theoretical calculation.

It will be interesting when you can actually give citations for your assertions, e.g. "Bondi formulas for accretion are obviously inadequate at this scale." and "Both Rossler and another physicist have developed models, different from each other, in which accretion of Earth takes four years."
 
I, for one, find it really funny that James Blodgett calls Reality Check's math "crude".

Hey, James: You know what's even cruder than his math? No math at all!
Perhaps you can provide calculations we can examine, for accuracy? (And, published papers to back up the factors used in them, would be nice, too.)
 
James Blodgett said:
However, the issue here is the motion of the resulting black hole in the rest frame of Earth. We have an inelastic collision, (inelastic because a Schwarzschild barrier forms) in one case between a particle at rest and a particle at rapid motion in the rest frame of Earth, in the other case between two particles with equal momentum in opposite directions in the rest frame of Earth. Do the math.
Click to expand...

Actually, yes, please do the maths already instead of spewing nonsense.

1. We're talking particles at insane velocities, so even if one particle has just 0.1% less energy than the other, or the collision isn't _exactly_ head on, the resulting particle will have plenty of velocity of its own.

And if you tell me you can know both the position and the speed vector with enough precision to say that both (A) they collide, and (B) they were coming _exactly_ head on, and (C) they had exactly opposite speed vectors, I'll refer you to Mr Werner Heisenberg who doesn't think so.

2. That doesn't matter anyway, for the reasons I've mentioned and calculated right in this thread. The resulting particle won't be in a continuum of matter to absorb, but in the largely empty space between atoms.

Even if it didn't have any charge, at that size it would just simply not hit many other atoms before it leaves Earth. But charge doesn't simply disappear, you know.

To even produce a black hole the size of a helium atom (so, you know, at least it has _some_ chance of bouncing into something) you apply:

r = (2G/c^2) * m

Where the thing in brackets is approx 1.5 * 10^-27 m/kg. We'll want to get a hole measuring 3x10^-11 m. So we'd need a mass of 2x10^15 kg, or two millions of millions of tons.

Each proton in that beam would have to have half that energy. The energy of a million millions tons of matter transformed completely into energy.

Let's transform that into MeV though. 1MeV is about 1.8x10^-36 Kg. So we'd need about 5x10^51 MeV per proton there to produce that. The LHC simply doesn't come even close.

If we got that energy from uranium, and assuming that we could (A) split every single U235 atom, and (B) capture 100% of the released energy, each atom split releases 180 MeV.

So we'd need about 3x10^49 U235 atoms split just to power one proton in that beam. Avogadro's number being about 6x10^23, that's about 5x10^25 moles of uranium, and a mole of U235 weighs 235 grams, or about half a pound or almost a quarter kilo.

We'd need approximately 10^25 kilos or 10^22 ton of uranium completely split and energy completely captured, per proton in that beam. We're taling a thousand billions of billions of tons of U235 per proton in that beam, to produce a black hole as big as a He atom.
 
Come to think of it, many cosmic rays are protons, and collide with another proton in the atmosphere. That would produce a black hole with charge +2. Such a thing, no matter what its velocity, is certainly NOT going to pass through the earth - in fact I think it would simply bounce off the ground and come to rest.

So:
  1. The theories that predict "black holes" at the LHC are extremely speculative.
  2. In those theories, any "black holes" the LHC could produce evaporate immediately. That follows from the basic laws of physics (the uncertainty principle, for example, and unitarity).
  3. If they somehow didn't evaporate and accreted fast enough to be dangerous, cosmic ray collisions producing charged black holes would have destroyed the earth (and sun and all other stars) long ago.
 
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