Hi guys,

Well, it turns out that old Warren has hit on a new original idea once again. After I wrote this last night I ran into this paper published on the arXiv (Aug 10, 2008) that makes a very similar point:


Unfortunately, they don't give out Nobels for reinventing the wheel. No priority this time--I'm a month too late. . . .

I argued that black holes in a white dwarf would reach a stable size that could be greater than the Earth and provide a power source for white dwarves without eating them. Plaga says that black holes could reach a stable mass within Earth without eating the entire place. Then it would provide a power source for Earth that would be many orders of magnitude greater than the Earth's intrinsic power guaranteed to raise havoc.

This would be a cool result except for the fact that it would mean the end of life as we know it.

They would fire me because they've instructed their employees to say that the LHC poses no danger.

1 billion per second is a lot different than 1 billion at once. First off they will not be lead ions and secondly even 1 billion particles would have the gravity of 1 billion particles, do you have any idea how minuscule that is? The LHC has about as much danger of destroying the Earth as I have of marrying Salma Hayek tomorrow.

Why. Worry for what reason. Let's hear a valid scientific reason to worry instead of the usual alarmist fare.

That would require you to do some reading for yourself. Which you apparently do not like to do. You have yet to cite a single reference to defend one of your sentences.

Do you know anything about the Schwarzschild radius? A black hole the mass of the sun would have a Schwarzchild radius of 3000 km. The Earth's is 9 mm. The equation is R = (2Gm)/c². You can figure out what the resulting Schwarzschild radius of a 2 proton collision would be and then explain how it is going to be achieved. The LHC will go online in 2 1/2 days and be up to full capacity by next spring. Face it, there is no danger from the LHC and alarmists have no science whatsoever to back their "chicken little" fantasy.

Are you a universal traveler that you actually can say such a ludicrous thing?

You want me to cite a reference that says black holes are formed by imploding stars?!? That is a mainstream claim and it is common knowledge in the scientific community. Now my question to you is do you know the science? you have the equation of the Schwarzschilr radius. Now go figure out what the radius of a black hole the mass of 2 protons would be and then explain scientifically how the LHC will do that. I will wait but you better hurry up since the LHC is flipping the online switch (of the large ring) in 2 1/2 days.

Oh Great.. So NOW it's a Conspiracy!!!!111

References? It's an unknown danger, there are no references. I could ask for someone on this forum to say microwaves could destroy the world, and use them as a reference...it's about as valid as the claims of danger from the LHC.
How about you provide references that they're are absolutely, 100% safe, exactly 0 probability of being wrong? That's what you're requiring for the LHC.


You made the exact same type of claim. Theory can't be trusted, so only trust observation. There is more observational evidence for the safety of this type of collision than there is for the safety of microwave ovens.


Big cut...

This is a public forum, both sides of the exchange are there for you and anyone else to review. They show you repeatedly twisting words to suit your own position, in spite of repeated correction. They show you ignoring rational arguments that utterly discredit your own assertions, and going on to repeat those assertions.

Since you're clearly not interested in debate, but are instead focused on spreading fear and exercising some tiny kind of personal power, I will not discuss this further with you.

If anyone else has questions on any subjects Warren Platts brought up, ask and I will do my best to give answer.


A street is far more crowded than the beam crossing regions of a particle accelerator. The particles are *intended* to collide, and most of the time pass straight through the experiment without hitting their counterparts. If one billion collisions happen per second, then there is a full nanosecond on average between collisions, and the other particles in the beams are about a foot away. Compare this to the size of a proton or even a lead nucleus...

You seem to think cosmic rays are something different. They are protons and heavier nuclei, impacting other protons and heavy nuclei. There is no difference.

Also, lead nuclei are not points. My understanding is that heavy ions are mainly used as convenient packets of large numbers of protons and neutrons, the binding energies being insignificant in comparison to the collision energies. Lower energies per nucleon, but a large number of collisions going on simultaneously, allowing for interesting interactions among the particles spraying outward from the event.

Even a collision between protons is messy, byproducts flying in all directions. So you need two protons to hit exactly head on, for their internal states to be such that they are entirely absorbed into a micro black hole, for their velocities to be exactly equal and opposite, and for more protons in the beam to directly hit the resulting black hole, which is now actually smaller than a proton and quite likely evaporating (and so jittering around as particles launch off in random directions). The first proton to do so will increase its mass by 50% and send it blasting out of the lab at a large percentage of the speed of light.

What is the decay rate that CERN predicts?

Before I answer...why is this questionable? Do you think it is a certain value you know that they don't?

ETA - BTW, where is the answer to my question about the Schwarzchild radius I asked you and why do you expect an answer to any questions you ask me before you answer mine?

Dude, I just cut and pasted this from a CERN publication on post #808. You are not only not reading what the people who disagree with you write, you are not even reading what the CERN people write!:

(R_H is the Schwartzchild radius.)

There you go. Now let's see if you can respond more creatively this time. These are from the CERN people, and they hardly seemed alarmed at the prospect of unleashing black holes on the Earth. These people eagerly anticipate it.

I think I've seen figures that the particles will last at the millisecond scale, in which case, you could have 1,000,000 particles at once, but don't quote me on that because I don't have the reference at my fingertips. I was hoping that maybe you did.

So your now claiming that your worried about a "black hole" in another dimension and you wonder why CERN dismisses your alarmist fantasy with a hand wave!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And a cover-up besides . . . .

Maybe I do but it wouldn't make much difference since you haven't calculated the Schwarzschild radius of a black hole the mass of 2 protons.

What does that tell you?

You know... "Black Hole" has a certain ingrained meaning.
Remember Disney's "The Black Hole"?
The very name strikes Absolute terror into people.

I have a dumb question. Are these Micro Black Holes REALLY Black Holes?

From what I understand, Protons, Neutrons - These are made of Quarks...

Black Holes are Densely packed matter- They achieve that density from their own weight and gravity soo...

How dense can a proton get?

If it can get really dense, then that must mean there are several more layers smaller than quarks- to allow room for all that packing in.

Next: Is it their GRAVITY what makes them so dense?Do they have this Horrific gravitational pull... On other particles?

Next: Black Holes are not vacuum cleaners. You have to get close to one before you get crunched.

In other words, if our Sun up and turned into one- THe Earth would NOT suddenly go spiraling into it.
It would stay in the same orbit for the same amount of time as it would if the Sun had NOT gone all dark and mysterious-like.
So, how CLOSE can particles really get to these micro Black Holes?
Assuming that the don't evaporate right away.

Can Light Escape a Micro-Black Hole?
Do Micro-Black Holes have Lagrange points...
How does the Electro-magnetic force influence a Micro-Black Hole?

My science is admittedly shoddy, but I have gotten the data from CERN's own site, not the alarmist sites. CERN is expecting the collision of 2 billion protons per second (1 billion collisions involving 2 protons) in each of their 2 experimental chambers. They are not trying to "smash" these particles, they are trying to "mash" them. Their expectation is that this "mashing" will be instantaneous and they resultant decay of this to also be instantaneous. Their instruments are designed to track the debris from the decay. The possibility of blackholes occurring is debunked by them by relating the collisions to those of cosmic rays, and Hawking's theory that a blackhole of such low mass and energy would decay rather than grow.
I feel their scientific reasoning is weak on this because, yes cosmic rays have higher energy, but much lower mass.
They are not trying to recreate particles that occur in the universe all the time, their instruments are designed to track the decay which is composed of particles that occur, but the particles they hope to be created in the collider have not occurred since the big bang.
Please go to the CERN site itself, read their mission statement, then read their safety assurance statement.
I do not expect a black hole or strangelets to form, I am not worried about them blowing up the planet let alone the universe. But if I lived on the France/Swiss border I would seriously consider a short vacation elsewhere.

In light of me and Plaga's recent idea regarding the presence of black holes in white dwarves, I must revise my earlier Bayesian analysis regarding the prior, subjective probabilities that a world-destroying event will happen (post #748, page 25).

The earlier model was:


Where:

• A. the probability that black holes will be created;
• B. the probability that some created black holes will be captured by Earth's gravity;
• C. the probability that Hawking radiation will fail in such black holes;
• D. the probability that such a miniblack hole will grow fast enough to destroy the Earth within 10⁹ years.

Earlier, I filled out the probabilities as follows:
But now, it apparently makes no difference whether Hawking radiation will fail. So C. can be left entirely out of the equation.

Moreover, with regard to D, the black hole doesn't have to grow to Earth's mass in order to render it uninhabitable. It might settle on a stable size and become a new power source that dwarfs the Earth's radioactive heating, thus wrecking havoc on Earth without having to swallow it.

Additionally, Plaga's argument, if true, renders moot the evidence that because white dwarves exist, black holes don't pose a danger. That was the one argument by the CERN folks that I found pretty convincing, but now I think that Plaga's argument actually fits the data better, in that it would provide a power source for white dwarves that would explain their slightly anamalous warmth. Therefore my D estimate must be revised upwards for those two reasons. According to Plaga, the question whether accretion is theoretically possible from first principles depends on whether the 4-D solution or the 5-D solution will turn out to be true--and who can say--so let's call it a coin-flip. And since there was no guarantee from first principles, the CERN researchers had to use astrophysical data in order to get their guaranteed safety factor--and that of course is the existence of white dwarves. But Plaga (and I) argue that such black holes could indeed exist within white dwarves without eating them up. So what is the probability that Plaga's theory is true? Well, I think it actually agrees with the data better than the theory that white dwarves have no power source. So it's got to be better than 1/2, so I'll go with 3/4, just to be conservative. So my total D is now 0.5 x 0.75 = 0.375; so the total equation is now:


So according to my calculations, I should be willing to take about 1:8 odds on a bet that the world will be destroyed. So if the total worth of humanity is only $10¹⁸ USD, then the negative expectation of the LHC is about

<$118 quadrillion USD>

What a deal folks!

Not that I feel your scientific reasoning is weak but I will point out an error in your reasoning. Hope you can follow this kind of cryptic answer so I will clarify if you ask.

e = mc²

Using the Schwarzschild radius as a measure of size, not nearly as dense as a black hole.


Nope. But due to the shallowness of the gravity well, it gets redshifted far less coming out from above the event horizon, and other particles can more easily escape.

Assuming the black hole completely absorbs the particles that create it, it will have mass equivalent to 14 TeV, + the rest mass of 2 protons (about 0.002 TeV). Defining the "radius" of a proton depends a bit on what you're doing, apparently, but a most estimates seem to be about 10^-15 m.
Google to the rescue (maybe someone with decent math software or time to do it by hand could check my math):
http://www.google.com/search?q=%282*...%28-15%29+m%29

Schwarzschild radius of a 14 TeV black hole: about 3.7e-35 proton radii...assuming no extra dimensions or corrections from quantum gravity, but the corrections would have to increase this by many orders of magnitude to make it even slightly comparable to a proton. Given that protons are not even solid objects, it's not hard to see why the rate of absorption of surrounding mass is so low.


No, they aren't. Cosmic rays are mostly protons, some helium nuclei, a few electrons, and occasionally something heavier. They impact other protons, helium nuclei, and every other element in the periodic table that's stable long enough to get hit by one.

Once again, identical collisions naturally occur all the time in nature, at this energy level and at far higher energy levels. The products of each collision typically vacate the area long before the next proton comes along, and even if they through some bizarre fluke end up stable and with zero net momentum, the odds of even one additional proton hitting them are tiny.

Please show with your calculations how a black hole can form without an imploding star and then tell me the Schwarzschild radius of the black hole. Finally, I would like to see how a proposed black hole from another dimension can effect anything in this dimension. Without any of that, I dismiss your alarmist views with the same handwave CERN gave your fellow alarmists. BTW, hurry up since you have 2 1/2 days before the LHC goes online.

Your formula is irrelevant to the problem at hand, because there very well could be extra large dimensions that effectively increase the Plank length.

Here's the link for a third time, since you obviously have not yet read it:

http://cerncourier.com/cws/article/cern/29199

But here is the relevant portion for your eyeballs:

BTW, I forgot to ask for your credentials because you have yet to demonstrate that you know what you are talking about. Fill out your own formula. Let's see if you can work out the numbers yourself. It will require looking up the mass of a proton and the gravitational constant, however.

And then you could make your point, which is still a mystery.

Thank you james for making Pippin's point clear. In the LHC, it would seem to be much more likely that multiple collision chain reaction could occur than in nature through random cosmic rays.

conversely m = e/c^2 , thus the "slower" energy is the greater resultant mass. CERN is trying to recreate/verify the existence of the "god" particle. A singular large particle that exploded outward in the big bang. This is related to the difference between kinetic and potential energy. They want to prove the previous existence of a highly dense particle with incredibly high potential energy rather than kinetic energy.
The mass they are expecting to see is the result of 2 protons colliding, but the mass they are using to create these collisions is that of several billion heavy lead ions. Thus if some unexpected result occurs it could have the potential mass of the total ions in use and also the potential energy associated with it.
They are not studying the impact of cosmic rays on planetary bodies in a controlled environment as some here keep claiming. They are asserting that what they are doing is perfectly safe because cosmic rays collide all the time without cataclysmic results. They are also not simply repeating the experiments performed in other colliders, they are moving past anything done previously.

My formula? Well I am a German Jew but I didn't die in 1916 so Karl Schwarzschild will remain the proper originator of that formula. So when are you going to start calculating? The clock is ticking and your alarmist buddies are going down in history as a black smudge on scientific innovation.

Do you have any science claims or are you one of those all talk no action people?

Guess you missed the meaning of that equation. MASS AND ENERGY ARE DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL THROUGH MULTIPLICATION BY A CONSTANT.