Black hole stupidity

[technoextreme]

I just read the most aggravating and stupid editorial on CERN about black holes. It's aggravating because it glosses over some aspects of the truth that would without a doubt prove Wagner is a crackpot. I would appreciate it if I could get some help to write a response to this editorial. Namely I would like to know what facts I should add and some answers to my questions.
A) Why was Wagner's first lawsuit dismissed in San Francisco? All I can find on Wikipedia was that it was dismissed with grounds on appeal if new information was found.
B) Cosmic rays. Am I correct in understanding that cosmic rays have been bombarding the solar system with higher energy particles.
C) Science cannot prove a negative. Since science can not prove a negative you not say that something will not happen with zero probability. This Im a little confused about...
D) If we were to believe the journalists we would all ready be screwed because the BBC idiotically said that we all ready created a black hole.
More and More Im beginning to hate how journalists take an hatchet job to science.

 

[leonAzul]

Thus, no one left behind.

Perhaps my right behind could make more sense than the author of that editorial.

 

[Tubbythin]

Hi,
Cosmic rays with energy some 7 or 8 orders of magnitude higher than those that'll be produced at the LHC hit the Earth on a regular basis. None of them have destroyed the Earth by forming catastrophic black holes.

 

[sol invictus]

C) Science cannot prove a negative. Since science can not prove a negative you not say that something will not happen with zero probability. This Im a little confused about...

I'm not sure what you mean by a "negative", but it's true that science can't prove anything at all.

So let's call the probability that CERN will create a black hole that destroys the earth p. Call the probability that the earth will be destroyed by impatient aliens if CERN does NOT turn on q.

If you can provide any evidence - any at all - that p>q, I would be interested to hear it.

 

[Cuddles]

B) Cosmic rays. Am I correct in understanding that cosmic rays have been bombarding the solar system with higher energy particles.

Yes.

C) Science cannot prove a negative. Since science can not prove a negative you not say that something will not happen with zero probability. This Im a little confused about...

There are really a few different issues here. Firstly, the whole "you can't prove a negative" thing isn't actually true. For example, if my hypothesis is that there is a sock in my drawer, I can go and open the drawer and if it is empty, I have proved a negative. What you can't prove is a general negative, which is bascially one that would require an infinite amount of checking. For example, if my hypothesis is that it is possible to put socks in drawers, no matter how many drawers I check, I can never prove the negative since I can't check in every single drawer in the universe.

Secondly, the nonsense about the LHC really has nothing to do with proving a negative anyway. The thing about new physics is that we haven't seen it before. That's why it's new. That means we really don't know what is going to happen. We have a pretty good idea based on past experiments and theory, but we can't know for sure because we've never done it before. Of course, if we did know for sure we wouldn't need to bother doing it. The probabilties quoted are about as serious as the probabilties given by the Drake equation on the chanses of extraterrestrial life. The equation may be valid, but since the values are mostly just assumptions, the final answer is just nonsense.

Exactly the same nonsense has been brought up every time a new particle accelerator is started up, and also for the first nuclear tests, the LHC really isn'y anything special in this regard.

 

[Fnord]

D) If we were to believe the journalists we would all ready be screwed because the BBC idiotically said that we all ready created a black hole.

You mean ... we're not all dead yet? And this isn't Hell?

 

[cgallaga]

Couldn't we not be dead yet and yet this is Hell?

 

[sol invictus]

There are really a few different issues here. Firstly, the whole "you can't prove a negative" thing isn't actually true. For example, if my hypothesis is that there is a sock in my drawer, I can go and open the drawer and if it is empty, I have proved a negative.

You're of course correct about "negatives" - another way to phrase the objection is to note that any statement can be phrased as a negative. But I disagree with you about proof. In your example, you might have overlooked the sock. That could be unlikely (although in my case it would actually be rather likely!) but regardless, it's always a possibility.

All you can do is provide evidence, which might be very strong, for or against some claim. You can never prove the claim, but you can be very certain, and if you don't think that's enough you can accumulate more evidence (i.e. look in the drawer again, or have someone else look) and be even more certain. Still, it's only in pure math that anything can really be proven.

 

[Mashuna]

You're of course correct about "negatives" - another way to phrase the objection is to note that any statement can be phrased as a negative. But I disagree with you about proof. In your example, you might have overlooked the sock. That could be unlikely (although in my case it would actually be rather likely!) but regardless, it's always a possibility.

All you can do is provide evidence, which might be very strong, for or against some claim. You can never prove the claim, but you can be very certain, and if you don't think that's enough you can accumulate more evidence (i.e. look in the drawer again, or have someone else look) and be even more certain. Still, it's only in pure math that anything can really be proven.

It's true that you can never prove that there's not a sock in the drawer. I agree that it's possible to miss a sock.

I can, however, catagorically state that there's not a clean pair of socks in the drawer.

 

[Tubbythin]

It's true that you can never prove that there's not a sock in the drawer. I agree that it's possible to miss a sock.

I can, however, catagorically state that there's not a clean pair of socks in the drawer.

I never have problems with the cleanliness bit. I always have a million clean socks. The problem is always finding the two that actually go together. I think there must be some universal law of socks. Like "in an open sock drawer, the number of socks you have to check before finding a pair is maximal." Or something.

ETA: My words sound kind of familiar. I'm wondering whether I've pinched them off someone else.

 

[technoextreme]

You mean ... we're not all dead yet? And this isn't Hell?

It actually wasn't a black hole. It was some phenomenon that mathematically resembled a black hole in which the BBC extrapolated to black hole.

Secondly, the nonsense about the LHC really has nothing to do with proving a negative anyway. The thing about new physics is that we haven't seen it before. That's why it's new. That means we really don't know what is going to happen. We have a pretty good idea based on past experiments and theory, but we can't know for sure because we've never done it before. Of course, if we did know for sure we wouldn't need to bother doing it. The probabilties quoted are about as serious as the probabilties given by the Drake equation on the chanses of extraterrestrial life. The equation may be valid, but since the values are mostly just assumptions, the final answer is just nonsense.

That does not sound right because it is one of the first things in my statistics textbook about how that the Drake equation is a hatchet job to statistics.

 

[CapelDodger]

Couldn't we not be dead yet and yet this is Hell?

At least we'd have the comfort of selling bits of it to the more credulous. In this world I'd feel guilty about it; in Hell, hey, that crap don't count. Guilt is gone, but gain goes on for ever, however meagre.

 

[cgallaga]

At least we'd have the comfort of selling bits of it to the more credulous. In this world I'd feel guilty about it; in Hell, hey, that crap don't count. Guilt is gone, but gain goes on for ever, however meagre.

You have a point.

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprise of great pitch and moment With this regard their currents turn awry And lose the name of action.

 

[soylent]

You may also want to consider that the mass of those black holes will be very, very small.

You've got two protons, each with 7 TeV of kinetic energy and if the entirety of that energy was converted to the mass of a black hole on collision, the black hole would have the mass of just 15 000 protons.

If the blackhole doesn't evaporate instantly, it will have one fourth the gravity of a single hemoglobulin A protein molecule, and it will have a schwarzschild radius of 4*10^-50 meters. Just doesn't seem like a ravenous beast to me.

 

[sol invictus]

If the blackhole doesn't evaporate instantly, it will have one fourth the gravity of a single hemoglobulin A protein molecule, and it will have a schwarzschild radius of 4*10^-50 meters. Just doesn't seem like a ravenous beast to me.

It's fun to calculate what would happen if it didn't evaporate and was produced at rest. It would oscillate back and forth through the center of the earth. How long would it take before it ate even a single proton?

 

[Spud1k]

I just read the most aggravating and stupid editorial on CERN about black holes. It's aggravating because it glosses over some aspects of the truth that would without a doubt prove Wagner is a crackpot. I would appreciate it if I could get some help to write a response to this editorial. Namely I would like to know what facts I should add and some answers to my questions.
A) Why was Wagner's first lawsuit dismissed in San Francisco? All I can find on Wikipedia was that it was dismissed with grounds on appeal if new information was found.
B) Cosmic rays. Am I correct in understanding that cosmic rays have been bombarding the solar system with higher energy particles.
C) Science cannot prove a negative. Since science can not prove a negative you not say that something will not happen with zero probability. This Im a little confused about...
D) If we were to believe the journalists we would all ready be screwed because the BBC idiotically said that we all ready created a black hole.
More and More Im beginning to hate how journalists take an hatchet job to science.

Science journalists are an odd breed. At best, they communicate science to the masses. At worst, they latch on to the most sensational stuff regardless of merit and make all the scientists look like crackpots. What is normally the case is that a non-specialist science writer doesn't quite get something, writes what they honestly think to be true that isn't and then the urban myths begin from there.

I think Wagner's case was thrown out because he didn't really present any evidence. All he's ever had is speculation.

 

[Bob Klase]

I never have problems with the cleanliness bit. I always have a million clean socks. The problem is always finding the two that actually go together. I think there must be some universal law of socks. Like "in an open sock drawer, the number of socks you have to check before finding a pair is maximal." Or something.

Try these:

http://www.sockcop.com/

 

[PingOfPong]

How long would it take before it ate even a single proton?

Can a micro black hole eat anything at all? Would its gravity be strong enough to break a proton down and draw it in? I'm just curious how it works.

 

[Reality Check]

Can a micro black hole eat anything at all? Would its gravity be strong enough to break a proton down and draw it in? I'm just curious how it works.

A proton would not be "broken down". It would just become part of the micro black hole. However it is unlikely that a micro black hole would encounter a proton before it evaporated.

 

[PingOfPong]

I was under the impression that it would be much smaller than a proton. The wiki suggests they would be on the order of a Planck length.