"have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth."
Talk about knowing just enough to be dangerous...
This guy clearly has no idea what he is talking about. Any black hole produced by the collider is going to be tiny. Massing no more than a tiny fraction of a gram. Currently theories hold that any black hole massing less that like a planet would eventually evaporate because quantum fluctuations means that particles can "leak" out. And the smaller the circumference, the faster the "leakage". There are reasons to believe this because the Big Bang should have produced enough quantum black holes that they should be relatively common. It is a shame, really. Because quantum black holes could be really, really useful power sources.
But, even if quantum black holes don't evaporate, one as small as could be created with any collider we have a prayer of building would be so small it couldn't consume anything. Well, ok, maybe it could swallow leptons because they are dimensionless point. But, baryons? The gravitational field would have to be strong enough to separate the quarks. And that would be an interesting thing in and of itself...
But, even if it could suck a quark straight out of a baryon, the rate at which it could do that would be so low that the protons in the universe would probably have decayed before it could acquire much mass at all.
"Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.”"
Now this is a little different. I saw Odyssey 5 and how the AIs living in the Internet were able to monkey with that supercollider outside of Houston to produce negative strangelets...
The scene where the Earth gets destroyed during the Shuttle mission and they fly past that SUV was way cool. |
