Large hadron collider

The LHC may well be switched on now, but the first collisions aren't due to take place until October. Even then, we are told it could take four years for a micro black hole to grow big enough to swallow the Earth.

While everyone else is running round in a panic, I'll bet Stephen Hawking'll be doing wheelies and singing the Told You So song; "Told you so! Told you so! Told you, told you, told you so!".

Only in a monotonous American accent.

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Hi Science Fans,

Right, I don't want to come off sounding like a spod here but...

From what I understand, even if the bods at CERN do create mini black holes, they will be so small that the chance of another particle even entering their event horizon (area surrounding a black hole) will be so huge it's not really even worth considering...

But in any case it's generally anticipated that any black holes created will evaporate immediately.

Interestingly though, people always assume that a black hole will consume things instantly. When in actuality the mass of the particles the black hole will be consuming will be a significant percentage of the mass of the black hole itself (or, even, possibly more), AND it will take a considerable amount of time for it to consume even a single proton.

But most importantly by the time these black holes could even come anywhere close to having a noticeable effect on us all our Sun will have already gone nova (a cataclysmic nuclear explosion whose aftermath we definitely won't be here to witness).

Added to all this... it's only that the LHC has received so much press recently that this has come to people’s attention, there are probably mini black holes being created and evaporating all the time above the Earth anyway as particles emitted from the Sun bounce into our atmosphere.

So no need to worry folks, rest easy, everything's gonna be OK...

... you’ve heard it from AIL Staff (aka people with no real grasp of science but with a wood-work NVQ) :thumbsup:

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haha nice finishing line ail.

yeah they can't maintain a stable enough wormhole to allow anything to pass through the event horizion and if they did then it'd be too big.

and if we did get swallowed it'd happen so fast we'd literally be blinked out of existence - and we wouldn't know what happened.

gnarly ey!!!

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Are you all geniuses on this forum? Gawd I feel thick! :-? :-? :scared:

Oh well, back to Cash In The Attack...

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lol no unforuatately i was just awake for that particular lesson in science - i usually only listened to biology and chemistry - slept for the rest of geology and physics (- minus the atom stuff)

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I wasn't too keen on science when i was at school, hated chemistry but loved human biology........ i should have been a doctor i tell you :nod: :biggrin:

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aw thanks for that AIL i feel better now.

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i know this is a bit of a turn, but did u hear that 2 days ago or so a 16year old indian girl commited suicide by drinking pesticide because she was frightened that the world was going to end if they were able to create a black hole.

apparently in india they were playing doomsday stuff in the media for 2 days straight and it scared the girl and she was really worried and her family were trying to get her to think of other stuff and not on the end of the world kinda stuff but unfortunately it didnt work.

i don;t mean to be a kill joy but since we're on the topic of the hadron collider i thought it important?>?>??

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