Anyone been following the news (and comics) surrounding the startup of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN?
There's a lawsuit against a few of the physicists because there's a small chance they could create a black hole and destroy the earth!!
Insanity!
Yes I've been discussing this in another forum.
The basic problem is, I think, the popular misconception of what a black hole is. Most people think it is some ravening beast that sucks everything into it. They don't seem to understand that a Black Hole is only 'dangerous' when you approach the event horizon - otherwise it's gravitation is no different from a star of the same mass.
When it comes to micro black holes of the kind that could possibly be generated by the LHC then there are, I think, two possibilities.
1) It will immediately evaporate via Hawking radiation
2) It will whizz off at a high fraction of c and never be seen again
A black hole could only be created if string theory is right and there are multiple dimensions at or around the planck length - which would mean gravity would be much stronger than the conventional inverse square law would predict and this would allow a mini-black hole to form. Otherwise (if the conventional picture is correct) the LHC has nowhere near enough energy to form such a black hole.
If a stable planck-length black hole could be created then it would be pretty interesting physics. It would offer very strong support for superstring theory.
There are various other catastophe theories involving strange matter and new particles, but most physicists I know don't take them very seriously.
I do recall this, there was a documentary on it as well.
The Collider can theoretically create a black hole yes, but as mentioned earlier, it wouldn't be created that it was so intense it would destroy the Earth and kill us all, the collider could not merely create a super massive black hole that will destroy our solar system etc. it would just dissapate or become unstable and breakdown.
Some scientists were skeptical but many are convinced and have backed up that nothing dangerous will happen except increase ones ego about their discoveries.
Ennex
Nothing could be sucked into a Planck-length size blackhole anyway. It would be too small for anything to enter. The wavelength of particles is much greater than the Planck length. The reason is the same as why ordinary microscopes cannot resolve to the atomic scale.
In fact, it's possible that nothing could even cross the event horizon of a Planck-length size blackhole.
