Well, since you guys keep bumping this thread, it might be a good idea to steer it back to it's original topic. I thought you all might be interested in Phil Plait's comments on the danger of the Long Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, that he made in his recent appearance with George Noory on Coast to Coast radio:

George: OK, to the phones we go with Philip Plait, the Bad Astronomer! Let's go to Vermont! Hey Warren, you're on with Philip, go ahead!

Warren: Hello. I've got a question about the LHC at CERN. You said it can't produce black holes but the safety report was based on a paper by Giddings and Mangano, and Steven Giddings himself coined the term "black hole factory" to describe the LHC. These guys are string theorists, and if string theory is correct, then they could create miniblack holes.

George: Mini mini mini black holes I guess, Philip, but the question is will these miniblack holes grow enough to gobble us up?

Phil: Well, there are a lot of different ways of looking at it. One is that according to the theory, if there are eleven dimensions, and things work out just right--and and and--you might create these tiny, little black holes. And by tiny I mean far smaller than even a subatomic particle. This was the original idea. There was some traction to it, and so a lot of physicists kept looking into this. I mean this was a serious thing. I think they were more interested into looking it not because it was dangerous, but because they were just really curious about the math and the science of it. What they found later, these reports went back and they found that "No it doesn't look like we can create these black holes." I don't have the actual, the complete details of this, but I've seen some of these papers.

Even if you could create a black hole--and I'm not going to concede that point--according to all the laws of physics that we understand right now, these things are so tiny that they would literally evaporate in a fraction of a second. They wouldn't be able to hold themselves together because of this phenomenon called "Hawking radiation", which is this idea that Stephen Hawking came up with which is phenomenally complicated, but seems to smarter people than me who understand it--I actually describe it in my book--I don't understand the details of it to be able to work with it as a professional researcher, but I understand it well enought to describe it in the book at least, and these things would just basically evaporate instantly.

Even if they don't evaporate--now remember every time I say "even if", we're taking another step into probabilities here--but even if they don't evaporate, they're so tiny that they could fall right through the Earth and sit in the center of the Earth and never encounter a subatomic particle close enough to be able to swallow it. So they would actually never grow. To them, even the densest part of the core of the Earth would be like a hard vacuum is to us.

And so when you go through all these things, and also the fact that even if you did create a black hole, because of the way particle streams are smashing into each other in the collider, basically the velocity that would be given to this black hole would be enough for it to basically leave the Earth. And so it wouldn't even be able to fall to the center of the Earth. It's not like two cars heading into a collision headon, with exactly the same speed and stopping. If one car is moving slightly faster than the other, they're going to keep moving in some direction. But in this case, you're talking about several miles per second, which is enough to blast this thing right through the Earth--and gone!

So, no matter what level you look at this, I don't think that any of this black hole stuff is a danger even if you could them. So I'm not too concerned about this.

George: Sure . . .