Scientists in search of the God particle may find more than they bargained for!

SlickSnake

Diamond Member
May 29, 2007
5,235
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Gauging a Collider?s Odds of Creating a Black Hole

by Dennis Overbye
Published: April 15, 2008
from The New York Times

In Walker Percy?s ?Love in the Ruins,? the protagonist, a doctor and an inventor, recites what he calls the scientist?s prayer. It goes like this:

?Lord, grant that my work increase knowledge and help other men.

?Failing that, Lord, grant that it will not lead to man?s destruction.

?Failing that, Lord, grant that my article in Brain be published before the destruction takes place.?

Today we require more than prayers that a scientific experiment will not lead to the end of the world. We demand hard-headed calculations. But whom can we trust to do them?

That question has been raised by the impending startup of the Large Hadron Collider. It starts smashing protons together this summer at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or Cern, outside Geneva, in hopes of grabbing a piece of the primordial fire, forces and particles that may have existed a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.

Critics have contended that the machine could produce a black hole that could eat the Earth or something equally catastrophic.

To most physicists, this fear is more science fiction than science fact. At a recent open house weekend, 73,000 visitors, without pitchforks or torches, toured the collider without incident.

Nevertheless, some experts say too much hype and not enough candor on the part of scientists about the promises and perils of what they do could boomerang into a public relations disaster for science, opening the door for charlatans and demagogues.

In a paper published in 2000 with the title ?Might a Laboratory Experiment Destroy Planet Earth?? Francesco Calogero, a nuclear physicist at the University of Rome and co-winner of the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize for his work with the Pugwash conferences on arms control, deplored a tendency among his colleagues to promulgate a ?leave it to the experts? attitude.

?Many, indeed most, of them,? he wrote, ?seem to me to be more concerned with the public relations impact of what they, or others, say and write, than in making sure that the facts are presented with complete scientific objectivity.?

One problem is that society has never agreed on a standard of what is safe in these surreal realms when the odds of disaster might be tiny but the stakes are cosmically high. In such situations, probability estimates are often no more than ?informed betting odds,? said Martin Rees, a Cambridge University cosmologist, the astronomer royal and the author of ?Our Final Hour.? Adrian Kent, also of Cambridge, said in a paper in 2003 reviewing scientists? failure to calculate adequately and characterize accurately risks to the public, that even the most basic question, ? ?How improbable does a catastrophe have to be to justify proceeding with an experiment?? seems never to have been seriously examined.?

Dr. Calogero commented, as did Dr. Kent, in 2000 after a very public battle on the safety of another accelerator, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or Rhic, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. Dr. Calogero said he hoped to apply a gentle pressure on Cern to treat these issues with seriousness. ?A crusade against it is a danger,? he said of the new collider. ?It would not be based on rational argument.?

Fears about the Brookhaven collider first centered on black holes but soon shifted to the danger posed by weird hypothetical particles, strangelets, that critics said could transform the Earth almost instantly into a dead, dense lump. Ultimately, independent studies by two groups of physicists calculated that the chances of this catastrophe were negligible, based on astronomical evidence and assumptions about the physics of the strangelets. One report put the odds of a strangelet disaster at less than one in 50 million, less than a chance of winning some lottery jackpots. Dr. Kent, in a 2003 paper, used the standard insurance company method to calculate expected losses to explore how stringent this bound on danger was. He multiplied the disaster probability times the cost, in this case the loss of the global population, six billion. A result was that, in actuarial terms, the Rhic collider could kill up to 120 people in a decade of operation.

?Put this way, the bound seems far from adequately reassuring,? Dr. Kent wrote.

Alvaro de Rujula of Cern, who was involved in writing a safety report, said extending the insurance formula that way violated common sense. ?Applied to all imaginable catastrophes, it would result in World Paralysis,? he wrote.

Besides, the random nature of quantum physics means that there is always a minuscule, but nonzero, chance of anything occurring, including that the new collider could spit out man-eating dragons.

Doomsday from particle physics is part of the culture.

Next year will see the release of the film version of ?Angels and Demons,? the prequel to Dan Brown?s ?DaVinci Code,? in which the bad guys use a Cern accelerator to gather antimatter for a bomb to blow up the Vatican, and it includes scenes at Cern.

In Douglas Preston?s ?Blasphemy,? a best seller last winter, the operators of a giant particle collider in New Mexico find themselves talking to an entity that sounds like God before religious fanatics descend on the lab and destroy it.

Some physicists, who have been waiting 14 years for the new collider, have proclaimed in papers and press releases increasingly ambitious and unlikely hopes, including proving a long-shot version of string theory by producing microscopic black holes.

Inevitably, these black holes have taken center stage in the latest round of doomsday alarms. Most theorists will say the version of their theory that predicts black holes is extremely unlikely ? though not impossible. But the chance that such a black hole would not instantly evaporate according to a theory famously propounded by Stephen Hawking in 1974 is even more weirdly unlikely, the theorists say.

Cern?s most recent safety report, in 2003, focused mostly on refuting the strangelet threat in the hadron collider and devoted just three pages to black holes, saying they ?do not present a conceivable risk.? It gave no odds. An anonymous Cern committee is working on a final, more comprehensive report.

Neither Dr. Calogero nor Dr. Rees say they are losing sleep over the collider. Some risk is acceptable, even inevitable, in the pursuit of knowledge, they say, and they trust the physicists who have built it.

But it would be more reassuring in the long run, as Dr. Kent noted, if everybody agreed beforehand how much risk is acceptable, before spending billions of dollars and major political capital.

One popular option to determine acceptable risk is to demand that the chance of a man-made disaster be kept below the chance of a natural disaster like being obliterated by an asteroid. Astronomers estimate that chance as one in 50 million in any given year.

Of course, thanks to those pesky quantum laws, disaster could come anytime. Or not. It could happen that the scientist?s prayer will be answered and your discovery will indeed lead to knowledge, human happiness and a new killer ap for iPhones.

?As in all explorations of uncharted domains, there may be a risk,? Dr. Rees wrote, ?but there is a hidden cost of saying no.?

Ok, let me be clear about this. No means NO. Unless they are going to save the world, and not risk destroying it, no means NO. This is the kind of misguided theoretical science that gave us the nuclear arms race. Does anyone think the findings of this research are going to be used to help us, or rather to find a new way to destroy us? Based on historical precedents, I would say destroy us. We don't need a fancy new strangelet ray to destroy each other. This is the kind of risky research that should be conducted on the Moon or on a large asteroid or on some distant planet like Mars or even on a space station, not on Earth. You can't just turn potentially destructive particles OFF like you can the machine that makes it. This was the same fear that griped the first atomic scientists who gave us atomic warfare. There was no off switch then, and there is no off switch now. And a stupid "Opps!" from the scientists if it triggers some unforseen accident, won't be sufficent, I'm afraid.

Of course, if most of us starve to death or die of disease first, the black hole they create won't matter too much.

THANKS SCIENCE! :p

CERN Large Hadron Collider Pics: A Giant Takes On Physics? Biggest Questions

UPDATE:

Scientists Not So Sure 'Doomsday Machine' Won't Destroy World

Still worried that the Large Hadron Collider will create a black hole that will destroy the Earth when it's finally switched on this summer?

Um, well, you may have a point.

Three physicists have reexamined the math surrounding the creation of microscopic black holes in the Switzerland-based LHC, the world's largest particle collider, and determined that they won't simply evaporate in a millisecond as had previously been predicted.

Rather, Roberto Casadio of the University of Bologna in Italy and Sergio Fabi and Benjamin Harms of the University of Alabama say mini black holes could exist for much longer ? perhaps even more than a second, a relative eternity in particle colliders, where most objects decay much faster.

Under such long-lived conditions, it becomes a race between how fast a black hole can decay ? and how fast it can gobble up matter to grow bigger and prevent itself from decaying.

Casadio, Fabi and Harms think the black hole would lose out, and pass through the Earth or out of the atmosphere before it got to be a problem.

"We conclude that ... the growth of black holes to catastrophic size does not seem possible. Nonetheless, it remains true that the expected decay times are much longer (and possibly >> 1 second) than is typically predicted by other models," the three state in a brief paper posted at the scientific discussion Web site ArXiv.org.

FoxNews.com can think of a few other things that didn't seem possible once ? the theory of continental drift, the fact that rocks fall from the sky, the notion that the Earth revolves around the sun, the idea that scientists could be horribly wrong.

We're also wondering how often the LHC might create individual black holes, since longer-lived ones have a greater chance of merging with each other, and, um, well, see ya.

If the worst comes to pass, and there's now a slightly greater chance that it might, at least it might explain why we've never heard from extraterrestrial civilizations: Maybe they built Large Hadron Colliders of their own.

But it was just one TINY mistake in the calculations, REALLY. :shocked:

Just take our word for it there are not any other mistakes in the mathematics, OK? :roll:

Seriously, we have already calculated the odds against destruction on our trusty abacus that there is nothing to worry about or anything! ;)
 

SlickSnake

Diamond Member
May 29, 2007
5,235
2
0
Originally posted by: BZeto
Honestly who really cares about any of this?

Ok, you can be the first to try out the black hole then. :thumbsup:

Who would like to be next? :evil:

 

TallBill

Lifer
Apr 29, 2001
46,017
62
91
Originally posted by: SlickSnake
Originally posted by: BZeto
Honestly who really cares about any of this?

Ok, you can be the first to try out the black hole then. :thumbsup:

Who would like to be next? :evil:

It doesn't matter. If they destroy Earth and kill us all it'll all happen so fast that none of us will ever know.
 

Jeff7

Lifer
Jan 4, 2001
41,596
20
81
*sigh*

Someone hears the word "black hole" and thinks that we're all going to die.

1) I think they said that the odds are like winning the lottery for 3 weeks in a row, every day.
It's basically impossible. When you talk science, they will say, "Yes, there's a chance." There's also a chance that every proton on Earth will spontaneously decay.
Link
"A lot can happen in an eternity. Protons, for example, while incredibly stable, are believed to eventually decay like any other particle. So simply wait for a period of time of the order of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years, and roughly half of the constituent particles of Earth will have decayed into positrons and pions. If that's still too much like a planet for you, you could wait for another 10^36 years, leaving only a quarter of the original Earth. Or wait even longer. Eventually there will be as little of Earth left as you wish."
Hence the quote in the article, "Besides, the random nature of quantum physics means that there is always a minuscule, but nonzero, chance of anything occurring, including that the new collider could spit out man-eating dragons."

2) Any micro black holes would be smaller than a proton.

3) The black holes would be created with subatomic particles. So let's say you smash two protons together. The black hole created would have the mass of two protons, and thus the gravitational attraction of two protons. I can just see it now, scientists fleeing the LHC facility. "RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!! PROTONS!!!!!"
Yeah, I don't think that'll ever happen.

Let's say one is created. Fine, it's inside a magnetic containment chamber. If it is deemed to be a threat, keep it in some sort of magnetic containment, and launch it into space. Again, bear in mind just how inexplicably improbable any of this is.



If I were you, I'd start researching a way to keep our protons from spontaneously decaying, because there's a much better chance of that happening than there is of us all dying by nano-scale black holes.



And don't make me start again on the use of pure science, and the "dangers" of new technology. I've typed it up enough times; if Search actually worked, I could probably find them. Maybe I'll do that tomorrow morning. Short version:

Without pure science, we'd still be living in trees, because no one would have cared to experiment with the use of caves for shelter, or using cut up trees for more mobile shelter. Without pure science, you wouldn't have had cathode-ray-tube TVs. When electrons were discovered, or when the interactions of electrons and magnetic fields were discovered, the scientists weren't thinking, "I can use this to enable the existence of American Idol!" If they had, they probably would have destroyed their work and killed themselves to keep the knowledge from ever seeing the light of day.

But anyway, those things were researched because people wanted to know how nature worked. Resulting from those discoveries have been numerous useful devices. Magnets moved past a coil of wire will cause electrons to move through the coil. Pretty useless, right? Moving electrons, who the hell needs that? What a useless waste of resources. Those guys could have been out working on a farm instead, doing something productive.
Oh wait, we can use those electrons to do work. If I connect those wires to another really thin wire, I can make it hot by moving the magnet past the coil. Congratulations, you've got an electric generator. Still think pure science is useless?

Dangers of new technology? At one time, fire was new technology. Should we do away with it because it can be used in war? Pointy sticks, also new technology at one time. Pointy rocks tied to sticks. Sharp metallic objects. All new technology at one point. Should we go back to a time before any of those horrible things were devised?
 

Perknose

Forum Director & Omnipotent Overlord
Forum Director
Oct 9, 1999
46,872
10,667
147
Originally posted by: SlickSnake
Ok, let me be clear about this. No means NO. Unless they are going to save the world, and not risk destroying it, no means NO. This is the kind of misguided theoretical science that gave us the nuclear arms race. Does anyone think the findings of this research are going to be used to help us, or rather to find a new way to destroy us? Based on historical precedents, I would say destroy us. We don't need a fancy new strangelet ray to destroy each other. This is the kind of risky research that should be conducted on the Moon or on a large asteroid or on some distant planet like Mars or even on a space station, not on Earth. You can't just turn potentially destructive particles OFF like you can the machine that makes it. This was the same fear that griped the first atomic scientists who gave us atomic warfare. There was no off switch then, and there is no off switch now. And a stupid "Opps!" from the scientists if it triggers some unforseen accident, won't be sufficent, I'm afraid.

Of course, if most of us starve to death or die of disease first, the black hole they create won't matter too much.

THANKS SCIENCE! :p

Some may die, we all may die, but if it somehow provides us with superior entertainment delivery systems and a floor wax you only have to apply once in a lifetime, I say, "Go for it!" :thumbsup:

 

SlickSnake

Diamond Member
May 29, 2007
5,235
2
0
Originally posted by: TallBill
Originally posted by: SlickSnake
Originally posted by: BZeto
Honestly who really cares about any of this?

Ok, you can be the first to try out the black hole then. :thumbsup:

Who would like to be next? :evil:

It doesn't matter. If they destroy Earth and kill us all it'll all happen so fast that none of us will ever know.

Actually, the destruction will happen in stages, most likely. It will gather mass or rather destroy mass and get larger and larger. We will be well aware what is happening for a while before we finally get destroyed in some really icky manner. The Earth may implode or explode in phases, for example. But only after nasty earthquakes and such ring the planet. They are searching for the "big bang" God particles. Don't you think this is kind of fool hardy when you can't turn them OFF if you stumble upon chains of them in formation while being created?
 

Jmman

Diamond Member
Dec 17, 1999
5,302
0
76
What a bunch of mumbo jumbo. Let's stop all science now since there might be the most miniscule risk or danger. :roll: If that was the case, we would still be living in caves. Just like some quacks thought that an atomic explosion would cause an out of control reaction, some idiots think that this collider will do the same thing. Not a chance......
 

SlickSnake

Diamond Member
May 29, 2007
5,235
2
0
Originally posted by: Jmman
What a bunch of mumbo jumbo. Let's stop all science now since there might be the most miniscule risk or danger. :roll: If that was the case, we would still be living in caves. Just like some quacks thought that an atomic explosion would cause an out of control reaction, some idiots think that this collider will do the same thing. Not a chance......

I won't bother to point out those quacks you are refering to were some of the atomic scientists who thought the atomic explosion might just cause that out of control chain reaction.

ok?


 

Jmman

Diamond Member
Dec 17, 1999
5,302
0
76
Originally posted by: SlickSnake
Originally posted by: Jmman
What a bunch of mumbo jumbo. Let's stop all science now since there might be the most miniscule risk or danger. :roll: If that was the case, we would still be living in caves. Just like some quacks thought that an atomic explosion would cause an out of control reaction, some idiots think that this collider will do the same thing. Not a chance......

I won't bother to point out those quacks you are refering to were some of the atomic scientists who thought the atomic explosion might just cause that out of control chain reaction.

ok?


I think your tinfoil hat is a little too tight , my friend.........it seems to be cutting off the blood flow.......
 

Iron Woode

Elite Member
Super Moderator
Oct 10, 1999
31,298
12,818
136
wasn't this issue posted here about a month ago?

some activist psychologist was whining about it. There was even a post of a physics forum discussing this and arguing with that idiot.

taking some theoretical extreme disastrous outcome way out of context makes these kind of activists look ridiculous.
 

SlickSnake

Diamond Member
May 29, 2007
5,235
2
0
:p

Originally posted by: Jmman
Originally posted by: SlickSnake
Originally posted by: Jmman
What a bunch of mumbo jumbo. Let's stop all science now since there might be the most miniscule risk or danger. :roll: If that was the case, we would still be living in caves. Just like some quacks thought that an atomic explosion would cause an out of control reaction, some idiots think that this collider will do the same thing. Not a chance......

I won't bother to point out those quacks you are refering to were some of the atomic scientists who thought the atomic explosion might just cause that out of control chain reaction.

ok?


I think your tinfoil hat is a little too tight , my friend.........it seems to be cutting off the blood flow.......

Does it hurt to be wrong after 4888 enlightened posts? :confused:

Ahhhh, that's cute and stuff. ;)
 

frostedflakes

Diamond Member
Mar 1, 2005
7,925
1
81
One of the big arguments against the critics is that higher-energy particles have been hitting Earth's atmosphere and the moon for billions of years, yet both are still here. Assuming we knew exactly when and where they were going to happen, we could observe these collisions in nature. Unfortunately, this just isn't possible, ergo physicists build colliders to produce the collisions in a controlled environment where they can be observed.

Based on what I've read, the risk (or lack of) seems acceptable. Just because we don't have the ability to understand the practical applications of the research being done by particle physicists doesn't mean it won't be hugely important to mankind in the next 50-100 years. As Jeff7 pointed out, there is a lot of "pure science" that may have seemed pretty useless at the time, but has found many practical applications.
 

WHAMPOM

Diamond Member
Feb 28, 2006
7,628
183
106
Micro black holes evaporate, geeeezzzz! For the same reason neutron star matter could not exist on the Earth.
 

IEC

Elite Member
Super Moderator
Jun 10, 2004
14,600
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136
I'll destroy the earth with flatulence before this happens.
 

SlickSnake

Diamond Member
May 29, 2007
5,235
2
0
Originally posted by: WHAMPOM
Micro black holes evaporate, geeeezzzz! For the same reason neutron star matter could not exist on the Earth.

Ok, I'm going to hold you to that. And if your wrong, we won't have to worry about debating it further! :D
 

frostedflakes

Diamond Member
Mar 1, 2005
7,925
1
81
Originally posted by: WHAMPOM
Micro black holes evaporate, geeeezzzz! For the same reason neutron star matter could not exist on the Earth.
Well, that's the theory. I don't think they're 100% on it, though.
 

SlickSnake

Diamond Member
May 29, 2007
5,235
2
0
Originally posted by: frostedflakes
One of the big arguments against the critics is that higher-energy particles have been hitting Earth's atmosphere and the moon for billions of years, yet both are still here. Assuming we knew exactly when and where they were going to happen, we could observe these collisions in nature. Unfortunately, this just isn't possible, ergo physicists build colliders to produce the collisions in a controlled environment where they can be observed.

Based on what I've read, the risk (or lack of) seems acceptable. Just because we don't have the ability to understand the practical applications of the research being done by particle physicists doesn't mean it won't be hugely important to mankind in the next 50-100 years. As Jeff7 pointed out, there is a lot of "pure science" that may have seemed pretty useless at the time, but has found many practical applications.

I already put in my order for a new Strangelet Death Ray Bug Zapper at Amazon! Improved death ray technology is just AMAZING!
 

sandorski

No Lifer
Oct 10, 1999
70,784
6,343
126
meh, it would be quick...unlike say if someone throws a glass of water in that thar thing creating the Mist...that would be freaky.
 

mitchel

Banned
Mar 27, 2008
299
0
0
Originally posted by: Jeff7
*sigh*

Someone hears the word "black hole" and thinks that we're all going to die.

1) I think they said that the odds are like winning the lottery for 3 weeks in a row, every day.
It's basically impossible. When you talk science, they will say, "Yes, there's a chance." There's also a chance that every proton on Earth will spontaneously decay.
Link
"A lot can happen in an eternity. Protons, for example, while incredibly stable, are believed to eventually decay like any other particle. So simply wait for a period of time of the order of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years, and roughly half of the constituent particles of Earth will have decayed into positrons and pions. If that's still too much like a planet for you, you could wait for another 10^36 years, leaving only a quarter of the original Earth. Or wait even longer. Eventually there will be as little of Earth left as you wish."
Hence the quote in the article, "Besides, the random nature of quantum physics means that there is always a minuscule, but nonzero, chance of anything occurring, including that the new collider could spit out man-eating dragons."

2) Any micro black holes would be smaller than a proton.

3) The black holes would be created with subatomic particles. So let's say you smash two protons together. The black hole created would have the mass of two protons, and thus the gravitational attraction of two protons. I can just see it now, scientists fleeing the LHC facility. "RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!! PROTONS!!!!!"
Yeah, I don't think that'll ever happen.

Let's say one is created. Fine, it's inside a magnetic containment chamber. If it is deemed to be a threat, keep it in some sort of magnetic containment, and launch it into space. Again, bear in mind just how inexplicably improbable any of this is.



If I were you, I'd start researching a way to keep our protons from spontaneously decaying, because there's a much better chance of that happening than there is of us all dying by nano-scale black holes.



And don't make me start again on the use of pure science, and the "dangers" of new technology. I've typed it up enough times; if Search actually worked, I could probably find them. Maybe I'll do that tomorrow morning. Short version:

Without pure science, we'd still be living in trees, because no one would have cared to experiment with the use of caves for shelter, or using cut up trees for more mobile shelter. Without pure science, you wouldn't have had cathode-ray-tube TVs. When electrons were discovered, or when the interactions of electrons and magnetic fields were discovered, the scientists weren't thinking, "I can use this to enable the existence of American Idol!" If they had, they probably would have destroyed their work and killed themselves to keep the knowledge from ever seeing the light of day.

But anyway, those things were researched because people wanted to know how nature worked. Resulting from those discoveries have been numerous useful devices. Magnets moved past a coil of wire will cause electrons to move through the coil. Pretty useless, right? Moving electrons, who the hell needs that? What a useless waste of resources. Those guys could have been out working on a farm instead, doing something productive.
Oh wait, we can use those electrons to do work. If I connect those wires to another really thin wire, I can make it hot by moving the magnet past the coil. Congratulations, you've got an electric generator. Still think pure science is useless?

Dangers of new technology? At one time, fire was new technology. Should we do away with it because it can be used in war? Pointy sticks, also new technology at one time. Pointy rocks tied to sticks. Sharp metallic objects. All new technology at one point. Should we go back to a time before any of those horrible things were devised?

Quoted because SlickSnake can't read it the first time.
 
Dec 10, 2005
28,754
13,927
136
Originally posted by: SlickSnake
Originally posted by: TallBill
Originally posted by: SlickSnake
Originally posted by: BZeto
Honestly who really cares about any of this?

Ok, you can be the first to try out the black hole then. :thumbsup:

Who would like to be next? :evil:

It doesn't matter. If they destroy Earth and kill us all it'll all happen so fast that none of us will ever know.

Actually, the destruction will happen in stages, most likely. It will gather mass or rather destroy mass and get larger and larger. We will be well aware what is happening for a while before we finally get destroyed in some really icky manner. The Earth may implode or explode in phases, for example. But only after nasty earthquakes and such ring the planet. They are searching for the "big bang" God particles. Don't you think this is kind of fool hardy when you can't turn them OFF if you stumble upon chains of them in formation while being created?

Black holes evaporate via hawking radiation. If a black hole was created, it would be so small that nothing would happen and it would be gone almost instantly. Jeff7 had a great post on the whole nonsense that you're article is spouting.
 

SlickSnake

Diamond Member
May 29, 2007
5,235
2
0
And I can't write, too.

It's those darn Strangelet monkeys typing away again.

Got any spare Strangelet bananas?