Al Gore inventing the black hole.
Posted on 01/19/2006 1:53:38 PM PST by djf
A fireball created in a US particle accelerator has the characteristics of a black hole, a physicist has said.
It was generated at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in New York, US, which smashes beams of gold nuclei together at near light speeds.
Horatiu Nastase says his calculations show that the core of the fireball has a striking similarity to a black hole.
His work has been published on the pre-print website arxiv.org and is reported in New Scientist magazine.
When the gold nuclei smash into each other they are broken down into particles called quarks and gluons.
These form a ball of plasma about 300 times hotter than the surface of the Sun. This fireball, which lasts just 10 million, billion, billionths of a second, can be detected because it absorbs jets of particles produced by the beam collisions.
But Nastase, of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, says there is something unusual about it.
Ten times as many jets were being absorbed by the fireball as were predicted by calculations.
The Brown researcher thinks the particles are disappearing into the fireball's core and reappearing as thermal radiation, just as matter is thought to fall into a black hole and come out as "Hawking" radiation.
However, even if the ball of plasma is a black hole, it is not thought to pose a threat. At these energies and distances, gravity is not the dominant force in a black hole.
The RHIC is sited at the Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Baghdad? Be careful, we have a lot of troops there.
As for its potential as a weapon, it's far less devastating than what we have at our disposal already. Its energy leaks out at a given rate, and there's no way to make it "explode". Furthermore, there's a limit to the rate at which a given black hole will "eat". You wouldn't want to stand near it as it fell towards the center of the Earth, but I don't think it would destroy the city unless it were unmanageably large.
I had never heard about their being a growth rate limitation. Any Arxiv references?
We can certainly speculate alot, and in fact we probably do know quite a bit, but remember, we are still talking about something that no one has ever for-certain seen. Even if the indirect evidence is overwhelming.
Only in a vacuum sealed by a electromagnetic cage, which has already been invented and is used to gather and contain naturally occuring anti-matter particles.
The problem is that with our lack of technology in controling gavity means we have no way of stopping such a blackhole from destroying the Earth if it got out of control.
If you want energy research, I would recommend for now either nuclear or antimatter research. Both are doable and the worst case situation is that you a nuclear meltdown or a very large explosion, but the Earth is not crushed to the size of a pea afterwards.
Also, nanotechnology might one day give us the ability to have zero-point based generators.
Blackhole research is to dangerious right now to research in a lab. Maybe someday on a remote planet somewhere, even in our solar system, but not now here on Earth for two reasons.
If it gets out control, we have no means of stopping it and no means of escaping it, through space travel.
Totally cool. If they could make it last longer and it was larger it would be a way to convert matter to energy directly.
> And so what. The micro hole will start eating other particles and won't stay micro.
That's true, but again it has no bearing. If a micro-black-hole was wanderign around inside the Earth, *eventually* it would consume the planet. Earth woudl collapse into a single point. But... if you were, say, on the Moon, you'd be fine. You wouldn't need to be "light years" away.
People seem to think that black holes are especially dangerous objects. They aren't. They don't reach out and grab things with Super Gravity. A satellite in low Earth orbit... an Iridum comsat, say, or the ISS, would be virtually uneffected if the Earth suddenly collapses into a black hole. Their orbital paths would be made less chaotic... there'd be no more atmospheric drag, and the uneven shape of the Earth would no longer produce odd wobbles in the orbits; apart from that... they'd be fine. Just a bit lonely, I suppose.
Thanks for the clairification.
Only if it shot them faster than escape velocity...
Nuthin' worse than a cosmic squib-load, my ol' Gran' Daddy used ta say...
Al Gore inventing the black hole.
Well, the cars impacted at such high velocities, and with such force that the little wire axles were bent, and made a terrible mess on the floor... So, maybe a really, REALLY tiny one...
Mark
Yeah, but I'm guessing you can't get torn to smithereens without first melting with fervant heat.
And NASA will get sued by the astrologers for making Mars gone.
Quite possibly the two things you least want to have happen at a federal government lab, in the same headline. Outstanding.
I was thinking more along the lines of Pluto. Mars is to close.
You're supposed to ping me if you use my name..... ;)
(Reading older article reduces the fun of responding in time.)
Paul
Cosm!
------T.S. Schmelliot
But you repeat yourself.
FTL space travel.
Form the black hole some distance ahead of your ship -- making extra-certain to make sure that "some distance" is a greater distance than the event horizon -- and then proceed to "fall into the hole".
However, since "the hole" is projected -- "formed" -- at a fixed distance from your ship -- it becomes an infinite "carrot and donkey" affair, forever increasing in velocity.
In addition to the cumulative velocity (infinitely increased by the virtually infinite force of the hole, smoothly leapfrogging Einstein's boundary), there should IMO be some "neat" short-circuits around the "FTL barrier" (first of which would be the "virtually-infinite" nature of the "hole force", second of which would be the relativistic effects of the "near-hole" vicinity that distort space-time).
Yeah, lots of speculation -- but IMO eminently do-able IF you are able to "project" a black hole at a fixed distance from your ship. Once you manage that, well, "it's all downhill from there." :)
Now, the punchline -- I'd much rather see them recruit gangbangers off the street to design Orion-class ships, than have "our best and brightest" fooling around with "black hole space drive" (or for that matter "black hole"-anything).
The absolute horror of a single "oops"-moment is simply unthinkable. Even if an Orion ship "goes Oops!", we'd only be looking at salvaging -- or maybe losing half the world, give or take; with a black hole ship, a single "oops" means the end of the solar system!
And pardon my impudence, but it's been my observation that the pocket-protector/lab-coat crowd is intensely "oops-prone."
Let's leave this wunder-device to the S/F writers.
(On that score, I will admit that my fear is in part "inspired" by a short story I read a few years back -- can't remember the title, or the author (I'm thinking maybe Heinlein or Kornbluth, but it could very well be almost anyone), and I'm not about to go digging through my "boxes of already-read books" :) Anyway, in this story -- quite credible, BTW - an accident at an experimental (fusion?) reactor on the far side of the moon -- placed there to protect the Earth in case of catastrophe -- results in a tiny black hole being produced. It's discovered when the fixit-guy finds the reactor pretty much intact, except for one small hole -- and a hole in the ground beneath it, which he cannot "probe the bottom" of with any tools he's got at hand.
He immediatly sums up the situation -- and says nothing -- but quietly quits his job, and makes plans to return to Earth in a few months (having "done the math").
What happens is that the black hole falls towards the center of the Moon -- and then goes through it (inertia, you know), reaching almost to the surface of the opposite side.
It then reverses direction, and completes its cycle -- ad infinitum.
Since the black hole is always traveling in a straight line, but, the Moon is always changing it's angle (relative to the black hole), the black hole acts as a pendulum, consuming an ever-increasing quantity of the inside of the moon, in a column a few inches thick each pass.
Eventually what's left of the inside of the moon heats up -- a lot -- and the moon becomes volcanic, with hot lava running all over the place, rendering it too dangerous for continued habitation.
Finally, the Moon is little more than a thin shell, with the "pendulum" cycling inside, at which point it implodes with great fanfare, bright as the sun (for a split second), and then, the Moon is no more.
However, since the (essentially invisible) black hole is in the same orbital position, the tides continue, and everything is the same on Earth, except for no more moonlight, moon bases, etc.
It's one thing to lose the Moon (in fiction, no less!) It's a much higher-stakes gamble to risk doing that to the Earth (and given our higher spin-rate, I suspect our demise would come much more quickly).
List some real-world examples.
I will admit that my fear is in part "inspired" by a short story I read a few years back
That puts you ahead of the curve: most people get their anti-science fears from TV.
Did the story mention Hawking radiation at all? How heavy was the black hole in the story?
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