Asking a Judge to Save the World, and Maybe a Whole Lot More

NY Times ^ | March 29, 2008 | DENNIS OVERBYE

[jammer]

Yeah, it is sobering. Sort of a Pac-Man.

[El Gato]

If you did manage to make a mini black hole, it would immediately evaporate. Because the creation would occur in a high vacuum, where the hole would have nothing to eat.

[CurlyDave]

Not if the black hole has an electric charge. Then you can suspend it with an electrostatic field, and it can't eat anything. However, small black holes *evaporate* rather quickly... like a quick chemical reaction produces a rather nasty bang and other side effects, so would a constrained black hole evaporation. But if it gets "loose" then it will "eat".

Sure, capturing the black hole if it has a charge, is possible, however, I don't think any provisions are being made for capture. And, we don't really know if a black hole produced will have a charge, or at least a charge large enough to capture it.

Once it gets loose, it will grow too massive to be captured, plus I don't even think we would be able to find it. It will be moving around underground -- good luck with an after-the-fact capture.

The problem with "evaporation" is that no one has ever seen it happen. Sure, it is theoretically predicted, but I bet that over 99% of all theories have been proven wrong by experiment.