magnet milestone for black hole machine
CERN has reached a milestone. They installed the last magnet in the construction of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), an underground machine that will be the largest particle accelerator ever built.
A large dipole magnet was symbolically lowered into the tunnel, completing the basic installation of more than 1,700 magnets that make up the collider, which measures 27km in circumference and is scheduled to be commissioned at the end of 2007.
There was no mention of previous setbacks in the press release.
One of the experiments planned for CERN is the creation of tiny black holes. While some people have expressed concern that this may destroy the Earth, experts such as Stephen Hawking have stated that if any black holes are created by the LHC, they will not be dangerous.
There is a question here of risk and the reliability of scientific theory.
One reason to believe that there is no risk is that the same theory that says that black holes could be created also says that tiny black holes are bombarding the atmosphere with high frequency. This could be called the "They're everywhere and they're safe" theory.
On the other hand, if the theory is wrong, then perhaps black holes are dangerous but rare. What's the chance of a hybrid theory turning out to be correct? One where, oh, the LHC machine creates a black hole that destroys the Earth?
"Nil", say the makers of a report on the LHC.
The consensus among the panel members is that there simply is no risk of that happening.
3 comments:
Cosmic ray bombardment in earth's upper atmosphere and interations at LHC are said to be similar.
This is not an accurate analogy!
* LHC will generate collision under extreme focused magnetic field confinement.
* Cosmic Rays generate free-free particle collisions under no confinement.
( This akin to the comparison of two cars colliding on the highway versus two cars caught in a hydraulic press. )
The physics and wave-function interaction for these systems is very different...
i.e. the creation of particles from energy stored in the magnetic fields within colliders.
This comparison seems more like a PR maneuver than sound physics...
and does not reassure me.
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The Large Hadron Collider [LHC] at CERN might create numerous different particles that heretofore have only been theorized. Numerous peer-reviewed science articles have been published on each of these, and if you google on the term "LHC" and then the particular particle, you will find hundreds of such articles, including:
1) Higgs boson
2) Magnetic Monopole
3) Strangelet
4) Miniature Black Hole [aka nano black hole]
In 1987 I first theorized that colliders might create miniature black holes, and expressed those concerns to a few individuals. However, Hawking's formula showed that such a miniature black hole, with a mass of under 10,000,000 a.m.u., would "evaporate" in about 1 E-23 seconds, and thus would not move from its point of creation to the walls of the vacuum chamber [taking about 1 E-11 seconds travelling at 0.9999c] in time to cannibalize matter and grow larger.
In 1999, I was uncertain whether Hawking radiation would work as he proposed. If not, and if a mini black hole were created, it could potentially be disastrous. I wrote a Letter to the Editor to Scientific American [July, 1999] about that issue, and they had Frank Wilczek, who later received a Nobel Prize for his work on quarks, write a response. In the response, Frank wrote that it was not a credible scenario to believe that minature black holes could be created.
Well, since then, numerous theorists have asserted to the contrary. Google on "LHC Black Hole" for a plethora of articles on how the LHC might create miniature black holes, which those theorists believe will be harmless because of their faith in Hawking's theory of evaporation via quantum tunneling.
The idea that rare ultra-high-energy cosmic rays striking the moon [or other astronomical body] create natural miniature black holes -- and therefore it is safe to do so in the laboratory -- ignores one very fundamental difference.
In nature, if they are created, they are travelling at about 0.9999c relative to the planet that was struck, and would for example zip through the moon in about 0.1 seconds, very neutrino-like because of their ultra-tiny Schwartzschild radius, and high speed. They would likely not interact at all, or if they did, glom on to perhaps a quark or two, barely decreasing their transit momentum.
At the LHC, however, any such novel particle created would be relatively 'at rest', and be captured by Earth's gravitational field, and would repeatedly orbit through Earth, if stable and not prone to decay. If such miniature black holes don't rapidly evaporate and are produced in copious abundance [1/second by some theories], there is a much greater probability that they will interact and grow larger, compared to what occurs in nature.
There are a host of other problems with the "cosmic ray argument" posited by those who believe it is safe to create miniature black holes. This continuous oversight of obvious flaws in reasoning certaily should give one pause to consider what other oversights might be present in the theories they seek to test.
I am not without some experience in science.
In 1975 I discovered the tracks of a novel particle on a balloon-borne cosmic ray detector. "Evidence for Detection of a Moving Magnetic Monopole", Price et al., Physical Review Letters, August 25, 1975, Volume 35, Number 8. A magnetic monopole was first theorized in 1931 by Paul A.M. Dirac, Proceedings of the Royal Society (London), Series A 133, 60 (1931), and again in Physics Review 74, 817 (1948). While some pundits claimed that the tracks represented a doubly-fragmenting normal nucleus, the data was so far removed from that possibility that it would have been only a one-in-one-billion chance, compared to a novel particle of unknown type. The data fit perfectly with a Dirac monopole.
While I would very much love to see whether we can create a magnetic monopole in a collider, ethically I cannot currently support such because of the risks involved.
For more information, go to: www.LHCdefense.org
Regards,
Walter L. Wagner (Dr.)
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