Someone check my math and reasoning on this...

m = 1 proton mass, 1.67262311e-27 kg (source)
c = 299,792,458 m/s (source)
c² = 8.98755 * 10¹⁶ m²/s²
mc² = 1.50 * 10^-10 kg m²/s² or J (joules)

1 gram of TNT is the equivalent of 4,184 J (source)

Therefore, 1 proton is the energy equivalent of 3.59 * 10^-14 grams of TNT.

Protons are hadrons, so I will assume that the LHC will be smacking two protons together. That doubles the energy equivalent value to 7.19 * 10^-14 grams of TNT. The energy that it took to get the protons moving and smack them together appears to be about 4 orders of magnitude larger, so it overwhelms the protons' energy equivalent.

The LHC can probably handle that.

Fred

*(Energy in a beam, 86,500 grams of TNT, divided by protons in a beam, 3.23 * 10¹⁴, is 2.68 * 10^-10 grams of TNT per proton. (Source))

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"For shame, gentlemen, pack your evidence a little better against another time."
-- John Dryden, "The Vindication of The Duke of Guise" 1684

The problem is if the mBH eats more than one proton.

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At 30 inches, they are the widest seats in the sky.

You're using the wrong equations for the job, but you're also making it far too complicated. The protons are being collided at a total of 14 TeV, which is about 15000 times greater than the rest mass of the protons. That's 2.2e-6 J, or 38 picograms of TNT. It may well release this at a rate of 100t TNT/s, but it'll last a mere 5.4 attoseconds and travel at most a couple nanometers if so.

A check against the total beam energy and proton count agrees:
724 MJ/(1.15e11*2808) = 2.2e-6 J
http://www.google.com/search?q=724+m.../(1.15e11*2808)

And yes, Warren, you can use the same argument for the atomic bomb, and you'd be right. You don't get more mass-energy out than you put in. The detonation of a nuclear device releases a fraction of the device's mass as energy, but that fraction is many orders of magnitude greater than 15000 protons. Total mass-energy output must be the total mass-energy input. If it isn't, the model's wrong or you're misusing it. If through some absurd fluke the black hole absorbed both beams in their entirety, it would still only release the equivalent of 173 kg TNT.

Thanks, James. That is essentially the point I was trying to put across: The protons' mass has less energy than what is used to sling them around. I did not know either value before I composed my message, so I could not compare them until I was done. I did the work so I could find out how much was involved.

The rate of energy release may be high, but the time involved in the release is so small that the energy released is also small. The micro-black hole won't last long enough to absorb any protons, and it will be so small while it lasts that protons will have a hard time hitting it.

Fred

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"For shame, gentlemen, pack your evidence a little better against another time."
-- John Dryden, "The Vindication of The Duke of Guise" 1684

This is confusing. I grant that an atomic bomb cannot create more energy than the energy and matter that the bomb is built out of. Nevertheless, the output explosive energy is more than the implosive energy of the conventional explosive shell that detonates the uranium core. But the output energy is much less than would be if all the uranium would be converted to energy, as in the anitmatter bombs that the US Air Force used to contemplate.

A stable mBH operating under the CFH formalism, however, would eventually escape the confines of the ATLAS detector and the beams that created it. Then it would be free to feed on any matter that was available. Like the steel composed of heavy iron atoms that encases the LHC.
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"All should leave Geneva. Saturn turns from gold to iron; the proton ray will exterminate everything."--Nostrodamus

There's the rub: mBH's aren't stable. A black hole of a mass of 1 TeV/C² (1.782662e-21 gram) will completely evaporate in less than 10^-88 seconds, and quite violently, too. This is 5.39124e+44 times shorter than Planck time! Far too short for it to get anywhere near any particle, much less swallow it.

All this business about mBH's in the LHC is non-scientific fearmongering. We would do well to avoid perpetuating these end-of-the-world myths.

However, don't take my word for it - let's ask an astrophysicist!

Ethan's bio.

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If I set the budget, we'd have Ares and more. Unfortunately, I don't set the budget, and Ares is just too expensive and too far out for us to accomplish our goals within the budget we were given.

If we halt the ISS, all versions of Ares, and transport Orion and Altair aboard DIRECTv3's Jupiter family of Shuttle-Derived Launch Vehicles, we just might make it back to the Moon by 2020.

Nostradamus did not write that.

The rub is that no one knows for sure what will happen because no one knows if mBH's can even exist, and if they exist what they will be like exactly. So it's all model dependent. I've taken a look at one single model. Under the mathematical forumulas it uses, combined with another formula that another model uses, one ends up with a dynamic equilibrium where the rate of evaporation is equivalent to the rate of accretion. It won't destroy the world--under this formalism, but it would destroy the LHC itself, and perhaps Geneva along with it.

Arguably, the Randall-Sundrum scenario is excluded by the cosmic ray argument, but the cosmic ray experiments done so far are incomplete. Same with arguments that invoke neutron stars and white dwarfs. I'm with Ranier Plaga, the various safety arguments are good, but there remains a recalcitrant, "residual risk".

I am wary of the "99% of physicists can't be wrong" argument. Because, historically, 99% of physicists have been wrong. The most recent, blatant example was the discovery in the 1990's that the universe is expanding at an accelerating pace. This was based on recalitrant observations of distant supernovas. What we don't want is a recalcitrant observation to pop out of the LHC that proves the safety arguments wrong.

That said, I am satisfied with the current de facto approach that is basically following the risk mitigation measures advocated by Plaga: go slowly and cautiously, and make sure you understand your machine and what you are doing and what you are producing as you go along. And this is actually the scientifically most prudent path as well, as HenrikOlsen eloquently posted recently in the other LHC thread. In this way, any black hole precursors will be found first, and any mBH's that are produced will be of the minimum theoretically possible size, and will thus be most likely to evaporate away to nothingness.

That also said, I still think there should be an international legal regime where people have a right to sue for potentially world-ending consequences of megaprojects like the LHC or nanotech, or whatever. CERN is currently legally untouchable, and it was only the accident itself and not the law that has turned them on a practically more prudent path.
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"All should leave Geneva. Saturn turns from gold to iron; the proton ray will exterminate everything."--Nostrodamus

Ah, RobDegraves. . . . We meet again!

Hey, I just got that quote from a quotation site. I did take the liberty of translating "RAYPOZ" as "proton ray"--it's most often translated as "positive ray", but what's a positive ray? Granted, one could make the argument that Nostrodamus didn't know about protons; similarly, one could object that it is anachronistic to translate Aristotle's "anima" as "genetic program"; nevertheless, "genetic program" is closer for our modern ears than "soul" to what Aristotle actually intended, I think; same with "proton ray".

But since you're a historian, (and probably know French as well) perhaps you could tell us what Nostrodamus really said.
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"All should leave Geneva. Saturn turns from gold to iron; the proton ray will exterminate everything."--Nostrodamus

What does it matter what Nostradamus had to say?
My Grandad used to say 'Save the String'
Maybe we should interpret that.

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Wow! Your grandad foresaw String Theory! How prescient!

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Conscious reasoning is an attempt to justify the choice after it has been made.

OK

"Migres migre de Genesue trestous,
Saturne d'or en fer se changera,
Le contre RAYPOZ exterminera tous,
Auant l'a ruent le ciel signes fera,"

In English (approx)


Before anyone else goes on about it, it's useful to know what Nostradamus was doing and what he was not doing.

He was essentially a massive fraud, one that is fairly obvious if you follow his life and deeds.

As a medical practitioner he prescribed pills made from rose petals to ward off the plague. Sadly his first wife and two children died of the plague. He prescribed filing the teeth in order to keep them clean and had a most interesting potion for sexual conquest, based he claimed on ancient texts.

As an astronomer he was notoriously bad at the actual work, making numerous errors on charts and most of the time refusing to do the actual set up work.

It was as a prophet that he really found his market, in a France where such things were wildly popular, particularly amongst the upper classes. However, he did not call himself a prophet and often rejected the title, while not exactly discouraging his clients from using it.

Lastly and most importantly, very few of his predictions are actually original. The majority of his predictions are translated into French from a variety of other prophetic texts such as the Mirabilis Liber and many of those are translated literally word for word. Very few people at the time, and indeed nowadays, would have recognized his plagiarism and likely even fewer would have cared.

Lastly....

I note that you have yet to publish your mathematical findings in any of the appropriate venues. In fact, you have contacted a number of physicists with your calculations who essentially now refuse to have any contact with you and consider you a crank. Is that not true?

It is and I know this because I spoke to them myself.

I see this board has gone through the looking glass again. Nostradamus? Really?

I bet myself 14 quatloos that Warren's response would be something like that. I guess I win...

Fred

__________________
"For shame, gentlemen, pack your evidence a little better against another time."
-- John Dryden, "The Vindication of The Duke of Guise" 1684

I agree.
You're welcome!
Rob, that is libel. Either put up or shut up. I exchanged a couple of emails with Benjamin Harms. Who else are you referring to? And if Benjamin Harms considers me a crank, he hasn't said so to my face.
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At 30 inches, they were the widest seats in the sky.

I have removed my post since it offends me as well. If the mods wish to reinstate it, that is their decision but I prefer that they would not.

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‘To those who regard “crime fiction” as some sacred icon which must follow a rigid formula, I will always be the man who writes 18-syllable haiku.’Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

Well, I am back if only for a short time.

I would like to apologize sincerely for what was a serious lack of manners and consideration that I consider somewhat atypical of myself.

In my defense, I was having a grumpy day and Warren has provoked me often in the past. However that is hardly a reason for being a jerk and I was. The conversations I have had with several scientists have been posted often in the past with full permission to do so, since the forums in question did not have any prohibition against doing so. However, I should have read the rules here first more closely. As well, I agree that it was mean spirited and a breach of manners at the very least.

I apologize to Warren and to everyone reading these posts, sincerely.

I am unlikely to post any more since I have little desire to do so because of the embarrassment that my gaffe causes me and besides, my schedule allows me little enough time. I might read a few things from time to time maybe. Thank you and fare you well.

I'm sorry, Warren, but you information utterly fails Ockham's razor. If this were even remotely possible, at least one super-energy cosmic ray would have produced such a BH in Earth's past, and we'd see evidence for it.

Since we don't, it doesn't exist, and the LHC's results won't result in something like that as it's energies are FAR less than the occasional super-energetic cosmic ray.

Again, this is fearmongering at it's worst! Please stop it.

Not both, Warren, as they're at direct odds with one another. The most prudent approach is to stop any potentially destructive research. The most scientific approach is to proceed full steam ahead.

The most enlightened approach is to proceed cautiously, which is what they're doing.

What basis in the world of physics supports the claim that the "minimum theoretically possible size" BH's are more desirable? This "smaller is better" fallicy is sheer bunk! We humans have no problem with carbon (we're made of it, we eat it, we breath it, both in and out) but give us a good doze of carbon nanotubes and we're dead!

In a similar vein, you do NOT want to produce Planck-sized BHs, as they fall into the unknown category. They may be stable, neither growing nor shrinking. They may last forever. For all we know, the universe could be full of them (dark matter, anyone???), but because they exist at the Planck length scale, we'd never find them. Seriously, for all we know space really is truly empty and the only reason we see the Cassini effect and imagine vacuum energy and quantum foam exists is because the universe is filled with Planckian BHs.

If that's the case, proceed!

The problem is, we don't know that's the case. For that matter, we don't even know if Hawking radiation even exists, as we've yet to observe the expected gamma-ray bursts from the supposed abundance of primordial black holes, and therefore have only theoretical confidence, but no experimental confidence, that if we accidentally created a BH it wouldn't swallow the Earth, in time.

So the most "prudent" procedure is to shut it down, and shut it down NOW. At least until we know more - a lot more.

On the other hand, knowing as we do that far larger energies in the universe haven't produced stable MBHs, so ahead. Proceed with the experiments.

Please do NOT get me started on legal matters, Warren. Legal deconstructionism is largely responsible for the failure of the now-proven exceedingly clean nuclear industry from providing cheap and clean power to us all. In general, the US litigation system has no concern whatever for ascertaining or arriving at the truth, but is instead focused on capitalizing (if not creating) strife so as to maximize profits. Armed with solid morals, they're a valued instrument to fight against those who aren't. When those morals slide, however, they become societal leach, extracting every...

I'll stop, except to say that lawyers were left out of the many Star Trek iterations for a very good reason.

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If I set the budget, we'd have Ares and more. Unfortunately, I don't set the budget, and Ares is just too expensive and too far out for us to accomplish our goals within the budget we were given.

If we halt the ISS, all versions of Ares, and transport Orion and Altair aboard DIRECTv3's Jupiter family of Shuttle-Derived Launch Vehicles, we just might make it back to the Moon by 2020.

mugaliens wrote:
I certainly agree with the first half of the statement, since that's not what the system was designed to do. All cases have A vs. B for a reason.

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If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.

That is a model-dependent assertion, not a known fact. Other models have the products of such super-energy cosmic rays passing harmlessly through the Earth. Yes, there are other models that say that such products would still get stuck in white dwarfs and neutron stars. But there are yet other models that say that neutron stars and white dwarfs are protected by powerful magnetic fields, and the fact that the rarity of white dwarfs with low magnetic fields is actually empirical evidence for the existence of world-destroying cosmic ray-created mBH's!

This is Orwellian thought-control at it's best!. Please stop it.

Sorry, sir, but that is simply false. The full steam ahead part. That's like when I was told to do a science project in the 5th grade and they turned me loose on a cabinet full of chemicals and I just started mixing them willy-nilly. I didn't learn much, needless to say. Full steam ahead would be like launching people to the Moon without going through Mercury, Gemini, or preliminary Apollo flights. Full steam ahead is what gave us Challenger.

I thought that's what I said. So what are we arguing about?


Actually, I got this idea from Lubos Motl. It follows from the first principles of Hawking radiation: the smaller the black hole, the faster it radiates. So if you are going to produce mBH's at all, then it's probably better to produce the smallest possible ones first, understand them first, and then use that empirical data to predict the behavior of bigger ones before you produce bigger ones.

Right.

I agree.

The LHC is a lot like the ISS: multi-billion science projects that are already built: they are politically impossible to just shut down. Never mind that one should never base an economic decision based on sunk costs. So the prudent path is the one they've now selected, go slowly and systematically, replicating past experiments, and properly calibrating your detecting devices, so that you can with confidence understand what it is that you are producing in near real time.

That's a theoretical claim, not one that has been verified with controlled experiments. Correlation is not equivalent to causation.


Uranium. . . . That "Great Stuff" that gave us Hiroshima, Nagasaki, MAD, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, tons of waste with no home, and North Korean nukes? Appropriately named as well!

As for morals, when someone like John Ellis says that the best way to shut up the fear mongers is to get the LHC up and running at full power as soon as possible is not a sign of solid morals. It's a sign of macho-cowboy, Fausto-Machiavellian, hubristic arrogance. And look what happened. They blew up their own machine as a result.

Not true at all. There was a two-part episode in the classic version that used footage from the pilot episode where Captain Pike was on trial for his life for violating the Prime Directive.

All that said, I think the current approach that CERN is taking is a good compromise: they are not having to admit any risk, yet they are proceeding in a systemetic fashion anyway, in effect following Plaga's safety recommendations in deed, if not in word. Therefore, both sides in the debate can "declare victory" and go home. In fact, if the mods want to shut down this thread because it's been beat to death, I promise I won't complain.
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Dear friend, all theory is gray,
And green the golden tree of life.
--Mephistopheles

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I asked this question a while ago on the Q&A forum but never got a clear answer.

What is the theoretical minimum size a BH could have? It seems to me that a neutron star represents the most compressed state of matter than can exist before becoming a BH, so any mBH would have to have greater density than a NS. But what would you be compressing to get a mBH? Free quarks? Protons? I'm assuming pure photons would not create one, since they can already exist in superposition, nor can they be "compressed" as far as I am aware.

But don't we already get protons so close together that they destroy each other in our existing particle accelerators? Will the LHC get them to be closer together so they would achieve the density required to make a mBH?

I'm just asking, what is the (theoretical) recipe for creating a mBH?

Rob