End of the world in less than a month!?!?

Question

The LHC Particle Accelerator will attempt to recreate the big bang, right, but, people say that a dangerous black hole will be created and the end of the world will begin! Is this true? And how and why?

Answer 1

oh jesus christ.... once again i have to say this..

look whoever made this up (cuz that's what they did) obviously doesn't know anyting about physics OR black holes...

yes it's possible a black hole can form, and if it does that will give us a chance to study them like never before.... but they will be microscopic and will exist for FAR less then a second (like a hundredth-thousandth of a second)

a black hole doesn't just suck in everything.. it is limited by it's mass.... these will be microscopic, they won't even be able to eat dust.... so they won't be able to even stay 'alive' by eating material(black holes 'evaporate' if they don't feed. with the possible exception of the supermassive black holes found in the center of galaxies.... scientist' do not believe it was created by the death of a star like other black holes), the won't get big enough to cause even discomfort in those near the black holes, much less put in danger the world....

Answer 2

Einstein/Rosen bridge will from between the mini-blackhole and the abyss at the center of the galaxy called Sagittarius A*. This will let all sorts of extradimensional (spiritual) nightmares into our world.

Answer 3

No my friend, the LHC will not end the world. Don't worry we won't die. When it says that it is going to recreate conditions last seen at the beginning of the big bang, it means that it is going to create temperatures and densities of particles that were probably last occurred at the beginning of the big bang. That is some major scientific data. It will help support the big bang theory even more, it will test the string theory, and it will help explain some of the dark matter phenomenons.

So, black holes are going to be created as a result of these conditions being created. These black holes will be microscopic... if they could be seen, they will only be able to be seen through an electron microscope. These black holes will have a maximum mass of MAYBE a couple hundred protons... if that. Now black holes don't automatically suck things in. Their gravitational pull is calculated by its mass. And it has a mass of a couple hundred protons. My dog has more of a gravitational pull than all of these black holes combined, and the only thing my dog is sucking up is food.

People automatically assume that all black holes suck everything up in their path... that's simply not true. In order for us to be able to create a black hole that could possible suck up a star or a planet, we would probably need a particle accelerator larger than the solar system... and the LHC isn't larger than Delaware!

And the black holes created by the LHC will exist for maybe a thousandth of a second before they evaporate. This process has been dubbed "Hawking radiation" after renowned astrophysicists, Stephan Hawking who introduced the idea that black holes emit radiation and loose their mass at a certain rate. The lower the mass, the faster they are going to evaporate. And like I said, these black holes have very little mass. They don't have enough mass to attract an atom, much less suck it in.

So no, it is not true.

Answer 4

Yes, sell everything you own and Pay Pal me all the money from the proceeds, the money on your person, money you have in all accounts of any description, sell all your shares and pass on all dividends to me.

Thank you

Answer 5

The chances of this occurring are HIGHLY unlikely, almost discarded as impossible. The world is not going to end because of the LHC.

Reasons why:

1.) To begin with, please notice that the creation of a black hole at the LHC is *not* possible in the standard framework of Einstein's theory of General Relativity. To produce black holes at the energies LHC can reach, it needs a modification of General Relativity at small distances. This could potentially be the case if our world had large extra dimension. There is however no, absolutely no, evidence so far this is really the case. The scenario is pure speculation, a hypothesis, a theory, or call it wishful thinking.

2.) It is not only that there must be compactified extra-dimensions, but the parameters of that model (their size and number) have to be in the right range. We know that the case with one dimension is excluded, and two should also already have shown up in sub-mm measurements, so this case too is strongly disfavoured. There are further various constraints from astrophysics that put strong bounds on the cases with three and four. But most importantly, there is no good reason known why these extra-dimensions should have the radius they need to have so quantum gravity is observable at the LHC - no reason other than it would be nice to have it shown up at these energy scales.

3.) Now to come to the issue of the black holes should they be created. Hawking showed in '75 using quantum field theory in the curved spacetime caused by a collapsing matter distribution that black holes emit thermal radiation. The temperature of this radiation is inverse to the radius of the black hole. The black holes that would be produced at the LHC would be extremely tiny, ~ 10-18 meters, and thus be extremely hot ~ 1016 K (that's a 1 followed by 16 zeros). They would decay within a time scale of roughly 1 fm/c, that is 10-23 seconds. They would not even reach the detector, instead they would decay already in the collision region. The only thing that could be measured are the decay products.

4.) The temperature of these black holes is so hot, they can not grow even if they pass through matter of very high density, like e.g. a gluon plasma or a neutron star. The mass gain from particles coming in the black hole's way (which depends on the density) is far smaller than the mass loss from the evaporation. The density of the earth is further several orders of magnitude smaller than that of nuclear matter, so there is no way the black hole could grow. Even if you assume the black hole has a high γ-factor (and thus experiences a higher density), this is not sufficient to enable it to grow.

5.) Hawking radiation is *not* a quantum gravitational effect. Hawking's calculation uses two very well known ingredients that are classical General Relativity and quantum field theory. It is true that we do not know quantum gravity, but quantum gravitational effects would only become important in the very late stages of the decay, when the black hole comes into the quantum gravitational regime. This would then affect the observables (and this ambiguity is thus somewhat of an annoyance), but it does not mean the black hole could grow. The reason is that if the black hole grew, it would come into the regime where Hawking's calculation applies to very good approximation, and it would lose mass as predicted. The scale for quantum gravitational effects to be important is the curvature at the horizon, which falls with M/R3 when the black hole grows, where M is the mass of the black hole and R is its radius (which again is a function of the mass).

6.) As has been said many times before, the earth is constantly hit by cosmic rays which undergo in interactions with particles in the earth's atmosphere collisions with a higher center-of-mass energy than the LHC will reach. If it was possible to produce a black hole this way which would then swallow the earth, this would not only very likely already have happened some billion years ago, but we should also see stars disappearing more often, especially neutron stars because of their high density. There is no evidence for that.

7.) For one, the protons at the LHC will be accelerated to 99.9999991% of the speed of light, which is really fast. I mean, really. If you bang them together it is extremely unlikely the created particles will be in rest or even slow moving relative to the earth. Indeed, as Stefan has explained very nicely previously, their velocity will typically be far higher than the escape velocity of the earth. Pictorially speaking, consider a car crash. Things usually fly around quite a lot, already at 0.0000001% of the speed of light. Second, even for the few black holes for which that wouldn't be the case, again, they would decay even before they hit the detector. In any case they would definitely not collect in the middle of the earth (or 'gravitate to the center of the earth' or whatever). This is a totally absurd idea that I have however come across several times. It is absurd because the center of the earth would generally not be on the produced object's trajectory (having an initial velocity), and even if it was they wouldn't stop in the center of the earth, why should they? Ever heard of energy conservation? As said previously, they are far to small (cross-section to small) to interact noticeably with the earth's matter so they wouldn't slow down. (If one really pushes it one can now go and estimate how long it would take them to slow down until they get stuck and so on. But frankly, this scenario is already so absurd that such a speculation is totally moot, and an utter waste of time, mine and yours.)

8.) About the claim that the LHC's risk report is biased because it has not been performed by people at "arm's length". Yes, to get a reasonable report about the difficulties the LHC might be facing I would think you ask experts. These experts are usually people working in the field. Would you prefer them to be random sampled from a phone-book? I honestly do not understand why anybody would think people working in theoretical physics have a larger interest in destroying the planet than other human beings.

9.) Finally, let me say that there is always some amount of uncertainty in everything we do. Yes, there is the possibility we are all wrong. There is also the possibility that you wake up tomorrow morning an have turned into a monstrous bug, because a cosmic ray has modified some virus to being capable altering your DNA. Or, as Arkani-Hamed put it so aptly in the recent NYT article: There is some minuscule probability, he said, “the Large Hadron Collider might make dragons that might eat us up.”

Answer 6

The Slipknot guy is correct.

Check the Source for further detail.

Answer 7

The LHC was cranked up this weekend for its first test ever and we're all still here.

http://venturebeat.com/2008/08/10/the-la...

The likelihood of the LHC creating a stable black hole that could destroy the world is 10e-25, according to Cosmic Variance’s list. The likelihood of finding God is 10e-20 according to the same list.

http://cosmicvariance.com/2008/08/04/wha...

The chances are extremely remote and even if it happened, they would be smaller than a proton, so small they would either evaporate immediately, or would pass through the Earth without hitting anything.



Among other goals, the physicists are trying to verify the existence of the Higgs boson, which is believed to be the mechanism that gives matter mass, one of the big puzzles in physics. It is also hoped the LHC could shed light on dark matter, uncover hidden symmetries of the universe, and possibly find extra dimensions of space.



Although the energy achieved by the particle beams sounds immense, particles hit the atmosphere every day which are much more energetic. On October 15, 1991, the Fly's Eye in Utah detected a proton (called the OhMyGod particle) with an energy of 3.2e20 eV. By comparison, the LHC will collide streams of protons at 7e12 eV each, 20 million times less.



The energy of the OMG particle was about 51joules, which is about the energy of a baseball thrown at 60 kph. The LHC particles are only about 1.12e-6 joules.

http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/OhMyGo...

Answer 8

Most likely not, the others have explained scientifically as to why not, none have addressed the fact that there is a chance that a small black hole can envelope Earth, but these numbers are very remote.  The odds are in our favor.  I'd be more concerned of the different dimensions the scientists are trying discover.  This could change our perception of life itself.

Answer 9

First of all - the power density of the LHC is enough for theoretically creating a microscopic black hole. As large as a atom only. Such black holes are, according to the same theory, created a million times every second in the upper atmosphere, as the energy of cosmic radiation is much higher as the LHC can ever get.

Such black holes are theorized to last only for a few nanoseconds before vaporizing in a flash of light. So, it is no problem. If they could get created and they don't vaporize, the universe would be full of microscopic black holes growing slowly larger. So:

if they can get created, they must vaporize by Hawking radiation. If they are not created, we don't know yet what happens with them, as Hawking radiation is not experimentally verified.

Next: The remaining charge of a black hole created by a LHC would make it impossible for it to attract matter. Any similar changed particle would get expelled by a stronger force than it is attracted by the black hole.

Finally: The power used by the LHC is pretty low. While it has a huge power density inside the beam, most steel mills use much more electrical power for producing steel. If a steel mill can't end the world, a LHC will also not be able to do much harm. Conservation of energy and the laws of thermodynamics apply also to the LHC. And 10 TeV sounds huge - but are actually only 1.60217653 picojoule (0.000001602 Joule) of energy. You already need 4.184 Joule for heating water by one degree Kelvin (or one degree Celsius). The beam will have during September testing only maximal 4E10 particles, so the total energy inside the beam is 64.087 kilojoule. That is only enough energy for bringing 200 liters of water to the boiling point.

This is also only equal to the kinetic energy of a car traveling at 11.32 m/s or 40 km/h.

So: There will be no end of the world. Don't believe "People" who just say things without actually being able to explain the mechanism.  

Answer 10

NO!!!!

BUT JUST INCASE ENJOY UR LAST MONTH!!!