![]() ![]() Protons race down this tunnel at 99.999999% the speed of light. Either way, it would end up out in the near-vacuum of space, where the odds of it touching and sucking in any matter so that it could grow into a menace would be smaller still. So a micro black hole could shoot down through the center of the Earth and out the other side without causing any damage just as easily as it could shoot up through 300 feet of the Swiss countryside. From the perspective of something this tiny, the atoms that make up "solid" rock appear to be almost entirely empty space: the vast space between the atoms' nuclei and their orbiting electrons. Swiss supercollider zip#Because the tiny black hole would be less than a thousandth the size of a proton and would have an exceedingly weak gravitational pull, it could easily zip through solid rock without ever touching - or sucking in - any matter. "It would only have the mass of a hundred or so protons, and it would be moving at near the speed of light, so it would easily have escape velocity," Johnson explains. But assuming for a moment that it is, what would happen when a black hole is born inside the LHC? The surprising answer is "not much." Even if the black hole survives for more than a fraction of a second (which it probably wouldn't), most likely it would be flung out into space. Many physicists have started to doubt whether string theory is true. The widely accepted Standard Model of particle physics does not include gravity, which is one reason why it does not predict that the LHC would create a gravitationally collapsed point - a black hole - while string theory does. (The other 6 space dimensions are hidden by one explanation or another, for example by being "curled up" on an extremely small scale.) Some physicists tout string theory's mathematical elegance and its ability to integrate gravity with the other forces of nature. In string theory, electrons, photons, quarks, and all the other fundamental particles are different vibrations of infinitesimal strings in 10 dimensions: 9 space dimensions and one time dimension. It would be the first experimental evidence to support an elegant but unproven and controversial "theory of everything" called string theory. ![]() Īctually, once the LHC is running again and begins producing collisions, physicists will be ecstatic if it creates a tiny black hole. Right: Any micro black hole created by the LHC would quickly evaporate, losing mass and energy via Hawking radiation. To date, the collider still has not produced any collisions, and it is the extreme energy of those collisions - up to 14 tera-electron volts - that could potentially create a microscopic black hole. That's because the physicists at CERN didn't steer beams of protons into each other to create high-energy collisions. But, for the record, it could not have created one on its first day. 10th, and why the Large Hadron Collider isn't capable of triggering such a calamity.įirst of all, yes, it is true that the LHC might create microscopic black holes. There are several reasons why the world did not come to an end on Sept. "There never really was a danger from the accelerator, but that sure didn't stop people from speculating that there might be!" says Robert Johnson, a physicist at the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics and a member of the science team for NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, which launched in June to study gamma rays from many phenomena, including possible evaporating black holes. ![]() The large 5-mile diameter ring traces the underground Large Hadron Collider. Above: An aerial view of CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research). ![]()
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