Question for you: If a black hole or donut does come into existence when the LHC experiments happen, how does one get rid of such a beastie without it consuming this panet, etc.?
"black hole" site:lanl.gov(letter to the editor)I wanted to say I'm a big fan of Mike Smith's weekly column - it's the most entertaining in the paper - but I think there were some inaccuracies in last week's article.
by Aaron Zimmerman
Daily Lobo
First of all, I highly doubt Los Alamos National Laboratory has manufactured tiny black holes in its laser-fusion experiments. This would be very big news in the physics world, as it would finally provide an experimental test for string theory, a proposed theory meant to unify all of physics into a single set of equations.
Some theorists suggest that if string theory is true, particle accelerators would create such tiny black holes in the near future. But there is little chance it's happened yet. Smith should cite a paper where such results have been published.
That major point aside, I'd also like to point out that if such tiny black holes did exist, they would have no chance of destroying much of anything. Take, as an example, a 1 kilogram black hole. An estimate based on an equation in Spacetime and Geometry, a book by Sean M. Carroll, shows that such a black hole would vanish in such a small time that even light would be able to travel only a few hundredths the diameter of an atom. There would be no time for anything to get inside this black hole. And 1 kilogram is really an insanely huge mass on the scale of particle accelerators.
The only way to create a more stable and dangerous black hole would be to compress more mass - a lot more mass. This is - and probably always will be - beyond our abilities here on Earth.
