LHC Facts

Q: Don’t Micro Black Holes just evaporate?
A: The black holes we know of grow at rapid rates, and the following PHDs and Professors of Math and Physics argue that micro black holes might only grow:

Dr. Adam D. Helfer: Do black holes radiate?
• “this prediction rests on two dubious assumptions…“
• “no compelling theoretical case for or against radiation by black holes“

Dr. William G. Unruh and Prof. Ralf Schützhold: On the Universality of the Hawking Effect
• “Therefore, whether real black holes emit Hawking radiation or not remains an open question“

Prof. V.A. Belinski: On the existence of quantum evaporation of a black hole “quote”
• “…the effect [Hawking Radiation] does not exist.“

Dr. Adam D. Helfer: QUANTUM NATURE OF BLACK HOLES
• “…the correct picture of a black hole is very different“
• “…completely alters the picture drawn by Hawking“

Q: But don’t most physicists still believe that micro black holes will evaporate?
A: Actually James Blodgett, who has a masters degree in statistics conducted a Delphi Study of 15 physicists, and he says “In 2004, I tried a series of Delphi questionnaires in which I asked physicists their estimates of several components of collider risk. As an example of the variability, estimates that Hawking radiation would fail ranged from 0% to 50%. The data are as follows: 0, 0, 1E-10, 0.001, 0.01, 0.01, 0.01, 0.02, 0.02, 0.07, 0.1, 0.1, 0.3, 0.35, 0.5. This was… before we were aware of the papers questioning [Hawking Radiation]“..

Professor Hawking has the reputation by some of the public as being infallible, always correct, but is this a valid belief? No. Dr. Hawking will tell you himself that he makes mistakes, and some of his theories have been proven wrong or conceded as wrong by Dr. Hawking, including at least one fundamental aspect of Hawking Theory, and some of his professors will tell you that Dr. Hawking was not an exceptional student. And some of his peers have even called some of his theories “poorly reasoned”. And some of his peers have questioned whether some of his ideas are even more pseudo science than science. But Dr. Hawking is creative and inspiring. Which means he helps to provide inspiring ideas, and inspires creative work. But would you want to “bet the house” that one of his unproven theories might prove correct? Probably not. Good material for study and research, but not to be considered as infallible by any definition of the word.

:geek: Professor Hawking speculates that it might be possible for particles to travel back in time, :geek: Professor Albert Einstein considered such ideas to be paradoxical nonsense, not possible.
:geek: Professor Hawking speculates that black holes might sometimes shrink, decay, evaporate, again :geek: Professor Albert Einstein considered such ideas to be not possible, against the laws of nature.

Professor Hawking today speculates that it will be safe to create micro black holes on Earth in the Large Hadron Collider, because he believes that quantum fluctuations around black holes will steal energy from the black hole. He seems quite certain about his theory, while at the same time he dismisses and ignores his own peers who write theorems disputing this theory as not supportable by science, disputes Professor Einstein who stated that not even light can escape a black hole, and apparently requires that vacuum energy does not exist. And he was recently quoted as suggesting that he should be awarded a Nobel prize for this idea. (Professor Hawking has never won a Nobel prize).

However Professor Hawking has also predicted that man might have a 50% chance of destroying man kind in the not too distant future, so Professor Hawking might consider “minimal risk” from experimentation to be perfectly reasonable. And I think Professor Hawking believes in his own theory of Hawking Radiation, so I don’t think he is too worried that the Large Hadron Collider might be catastrophically dangerous. Unfortunately many other scientists do not share Professor Hawking’s confidense in such safety theories.

Credibility of Hawking Radiation is strongly disputed:

2008 … this prediction is not without its problems… no very good responses to these concerns… completely alters the picture drawn by Hawking… http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/gr-qc/pdf/0503/0503052v1.pdf

2008 … Max-Plank-Institut fur Astrophysik: The results indicate that on average, “low mass” black holes of less than a hundred million solar masses are still growing at a significant rate. http://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/mpa/research/current_research/hl2004-7/hl2004-7-en.html

2004 … 9.9% average doubt, ranging from 0% to 50% doubt Delphi study of 15 physicists : http://www.lhcconcerns.com/#James_Blodgett, even before much of the peer reviewed credible rejection of Hawking Radiation was published

2003 … Yet this prediction rests on two dubious assumptions… no compelling theoretical case for or against radiation by black holes: http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0304042

1900s … Albert Einstein’s theories require that black holes only grow, they never shrink, not even light can exit a black hole

Recently when asked if the Large Hadron Collider was safe, :geek: Professor Hawking said “Particles from collisions far greater than those in the LHC occur all the time in cosmic rays, but nothing terrible happens.”. What? (http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-hawking12apr12,1,3191870.story)

Even CERN’s own LHC Safety Assessment Group has conceded the that cosmic ray impacts with Earth could not endanger Earth, because unlike paricles created by head-on collider collisions, cosmic ray created particles travel too fast to be captured by Earths gravity and are all safely expelled into space at relativistic speeds.

Why are we in a rush to start up the Large Hadron Collider, when there is so much uncertainty about the safety of this experiment?
Why do we have faith that micro black holes might evaporate when this is disputed by peer reviewed studies, professor Einstein’s theories and possibly by cosmological evidence that seems to suggest otherwise?
Why are we still publicly told that cosmic rays prove safety, by CERNs web site and by professor Hawking?
Why are we still waiting for a proof of safety that was promised by the end of 2007?

Unfortunately the answer may be that we are unable to prove safety or not with reasonable certainty at this time, that may still be a few years away.
Even more unfortunately, there may be scientists that are willing to take some non-trivial risk, possibly even a substantial risk, because the science that the Large Hadron Collider will provide will be so astounding.

For me, I would far rather wait 20 years to discover the same science through safer, passive methods that would not endanger the planet. 20 years to possibly save 5 billion years.
CERN is not even prepared to delay for 2 years to prove reasonable safety. What are they thinking… They may be thinking “we need to start this experiment as quickly as possible before the risks are deemed by outsiders to be too significant, before public opinion turns against us…” In my humble opinion, if CERN scientists were being responsible, they would slow down, not speed up…

Q: Wouldn’t more powerful cosmic rays create micro black holes if particle colliders could?

A: Well, a single rare high energy cosmic ray may involve a single proton impact with a relatively stationary particle on Earth and send all results safely into space, while collider collisions may involve thousands of protons (or protons to anti-protons) colliding head-on at 99.9999991% of the speed of light in both directions in temperatures lower than space with powerful magnetic fields to help focus all the energy to a single point in space and particles created may be captured by Earth’s gravity.

Walter L. Wagner:
(Orginally posted at LHC Concerns)

Nuclear Physicist Walter L Wagner is noted for his role in the discovery of an anomalous cosmic ray in 1975 that was tentatively identified as a magnetic monopole. See Time magazine, August 25, 1975, “Bring it Back Alive” and “Evidence for the Detection of a Moving Magnetic Monopole”, Physical Review Letters,. Vol. 35, (1975)

Most physicists are convinced that Hawking radiation is a reality, so they’ve never investigated issues from the perspective that perhaps Hawking radiation isn’t real [it's thus-far only theory, as it's never been observed]. Thus, they quickly jumped to the [erroneous] conclusion that the cosmic ray argument backs them up.

In that argument, they recognized that high energy cosmic rays routinely impact earth [moon, etc.] at center-of-momentum energies greater than the center-of-momentum energies of the LHC. So, if micro black holes [MBHs] can be created, then they’re created in nature too, and since we’re still here, that means that Hawking radiation works [if there is such a thing as micro black holes -- most physicists don't necessarily believe that they can be created, but admit that they might be creatable].

Having a quick ‘back-up’ to their pet theory of the reality of Hawking radiation, they looked no further.

The fallacy of that cosmic ray argument, however, as pointed out by ebenonce, is that any such MBH created in nature is nearly relativistic relative to earth, i.e. traveling at 0.9999+c
At that speed, earth would essentially be invisible to them, and they would travel through unimpeded. This is analogous to neutrinos that can travel great distances through matter without interaction.

Yet the LHC would create many such MBHs [again, if they can be created, and we don't know that for a fact either] at slow speed, such that they are gravitationally captured by earth. At slow speed, a) earth would not be quite so invisible, and b) they would repeatedly pass through earth over and over again, and thus be able to interact on occasion, grow larger, and increase their ability to interact. While some now estimate that it might take billions of years for any one MBH to grow large enough to rapidly consume the earth, the LHC might create them at the rate of 1/second, which would allow them to have an additive effect, reduce that time of destruction to millenia or less.

CERN has now recognized this oversight, and is trying additional arguments, which they anticipate to publish soon. Once such argument relies on the existence of neutron stars in our galaxy. They reason that cosmic rays impinging on neutron stars would create MBHs, and that they would convert the neutron star into a BH. Because there are still lots of neutron stars, they reason that the MBH must instead evaporate via Hawking radiation. However, again, it might be possible for a high speed MBH to transit a neutron star [as a neutrino can] at 0.9999c, while a low speed [.0000001c] one would not. We really don’t know the difference in cross-section for interaction for such particles. For neutrons, we had to measure it by experiment, and they differ by many many orders of magnitude.

Also, some 95% of the mass of our galaxy is “dark matter”, matter that can’t be seen by light, but has gravitational influence. Perhaps we do lose some neutron stars over billions of years by a few that managed to capture even a high-speed MBH, and they are now the “missing mass” of our galaxy. This also needs to be investigated more thoroughly, in my view.

Thanks for thinking about this. Why don’t you write to CERN about this?

Existing colliders are many times less powerful than the Large Hadron Collider. And most physicists think that the much lower power existing head-on particle colliders have not created micro black holes. However there have been some incidents that hint that science may be close to creating micro black holes even with less powerful colliders, and papers published by MIT physicists argue that bosenova implosions of ultra-cold Bose-Einstein Condensates with Attractive Interactions could result in micro black holes of infinite density. However at least one author of one of those papers argues that the papers may be misleading. Our initial investigation indicates that the papers do appear to predict “real micro black holes”.

RHIC Fireball
For example, Horatiu Nastase of Brown University writes: “We argue that the fireball observed at RHIC is (the analog of) a dual black hole.” The RHIC fireball as a dual black hole by Horatiu Nastase: “… dual to gravitational interaction inside the black hole, deconfining quarks and gluons…”, “… core of the fireball is the pion field soliton=black hole interior…”, “… Most likely there will be no singularity for this black hole….”

The RHIC fireball is not believed to be a true micro black hole, but only the pre-cursor to, or the analog of a micro black hole. Creation of a true micro black hole has been predicted based on some theories to require at least 1 Tev of highly focused energy such as can be achieved with head-on collisions generated by the Large Hadron Collider.

Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) Bosenova Implosion
Nobel laureate Dr. Eric A. Cornell, who leads Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) research at the University of Colorado, wrote of the possibility of stable micro black hole creation as an explanation for missing atoms after an unexpected BEC bosenova implosion at the university of Colorado using naturally attractive Rb85 atoms, “probably not a black hole, more likely…“, though Dr. Cornell doesn’t think a micro black hole was created by one of his experiments, and he explains that the term “probably not” was merely a diplomatic response to that suggestion, and not meant to indicate a belief that micro black hole creation was plausible. Dr. Carl E. Wieman, who also shares the 2001 Nobel prize for Physics writes “I can state ABSOLUTELY CATEGORICALLY that it is totally inconceivable that a black hole could be produced by these phenomena.” However physicists at MIT published papers that appear to suggest (paraphrase) “probably a black hole“.

A difference of opinion appears to exist between the University of Colorado team and physics researcher’s at MIT including Masahito Ueda and Kerson Huang who conduct similar research, based on my understanding of related published material on the subject and communications with some of the physicists involved.

The unexplained Bosenova implosion of Bose-Einstein Condensate with attractive interactions involved a “super atom” at 3 nk (3 billionths of a degree above absolute zero) containing approximately 16,000 naturally attracting Rb85 atoms that were induced to repel to make the condensate stable. From the Wikipedia article on the subject:

When the scientists raised the magnetic field strength still further, the condensate suddenly reverted back to attraction, imploded and shrank beyond detection, and then exploded, blowing off about two-thirds of its 10,000 or so atoms. About half of the atoms in the condensate seemed to have disappeared from the experiment altogether, not being seen either in the cold remnant or the expanding gas cloud.

These atoms were compressed to a single giant atom while mutually repelling each other, and when the atoms were subsequently induced to attract to each other, the BEC unexpectedly imploded beyond detection then exploded and after the explosion thousands of atoms could not be accounted for, they unexpectedly and mysteriously vanished. BOSE-EINSTEIN CONDENSATION IN A DILUTE GAS; THE FIRST 70 YEARS AND SOME RECENT EXPERIMENTS

This incident was named bosenova because of its similarity to a “core collapse supernova”.

“However, as yet there is no clear explanation of the energy and anisotropy of the atoms in the explosion, the fraction of vanished atoms, and the size of the cold remnant. One of the more puzzling aspects is that the cold remnant can be far larger than the condensate stability condition that determines the collapse point would seem to allow “

“The atoms that seem to have disappeared almost certainly still exist in some form, just not in a form that could be detected in that experiment. Two likely possibilities are that they formed molecules consisting of two bonded rubidium atoms, or that they somehow received enough energy to fly away fast enough that they left the observation region before they could be observed. They may also have undergone nuclear fusion.”

For a good start understanding what a Bose-Einstein Condensate is, I recommend Dr. Cornell’s high quality web site written in lay person’s terms with several interactive graphics describing Boes-Einstein Condensates

I found the following short article by Science@NASA to be very interesting. The article My Pet Neutron Star speaks of the desire of physicists to create micro black holes in the laboratory and how this might be accomplished.

Neutron stars and their cousins, white dwarfs and black holes, are extreme forms of matter that many scientists would love to tinker with — if only they could get one in their lab. But how? Researchers experimenting with a new form of matter called Bose-Einstein condensates may have found a way.

Is it plausible to believe that bosenova implosions from Bose-Einstein Condensates with attractive interactions might theoretically create the same type of micro black holes that some theories predict might be caused by head-on particle collisions above 1 Tev, and therefore the safety discussion with respect to creation of micro black holes in head-on colliders, which is currently being debated, might also relate to some forms of BEC experimentation? Papers published by the MIT team appear to indicate this.

Have any of these experiments shown any evidence that might tend to support or debunk Hawking Radiation theory? Unknown. Such experimental evidence might be of extreme interest as it relates to the current Safety debate concerning the Large Hadron Collider and predictions that the LHC might create micro black holes.

JTankers

Additional References Added June 9, 2008:

What Studies tend to predict that Micro-Black Holes might plausibly be formed from Bose-Einstein Condensate Bosenova Implosions?

Instability of a Bose-Einstein Condensate with Attractive Interaction by Antonios Eleftheriou and Kerson Huang, Department of Physics and Center for Theoretical Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA (February 1, 2008)

“…local collapse to a state of infinite density.”
“We verify that the picture presented by Ueda and Huang is correct. For N > Nc , a “black-hole” does appear at the center of the trap”

Physicists researchers at MIT appear to suggest that laboratory created Bose-Einstein Condensate Bosenova implosions might result in the creation of micro black holes:

Cold Trapped Atoms: A Mesoscopic System by Kerson Huang, Department of Physics and Center for Theoretical Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT-CTP#3048

“A black hole opens up at the center, …density fluctuations becomes infinite“
“The density in the black hole shoots up as time goes on, fed by waves of implosion“

Physicists researchers at MIT appear to suggest that laboratory created Bose-Einstein Condensate Bosenova implosions might result in the creation of micro black holes:

Instability of a Bose-Einstein condensate with an attractive interaction by Department of Physics and Center for Theoretical Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139

“results are consistent with the formation of a “black hole” of infinite density fluctuations, as predicted by Ueda and Huang”

Theories proposed by Los Alamos Researchers indicate that black holes might contain a new form of matter that is less than infinitely dense, and may actually be similar to Bose-Einstein condensate matter.

Los Alamos researcher says ‘black holes’ aren’t holes at all by James E. Rickman, elvis@lanl.gov, (505) 665-9203, LOS ALAMOS, N.M., April 21, 2002

“Mottola and Pawel suggest that while some degree of collapsing does take place in a dying star, the collapse proceeds only to a certain point. At that point, the intense gravity of the dying star transforms the star’s matter into an entirely new phase. Mottolla describes this phase as similar to a Bose-Einstein condensate, a phase of matter recently observed in a laboratory setting and the subject of scientific excitement in the past few years. “

However Nobel Laureates Dr. Eric A. Cornell and Dr. Carl E. Wieman argue that micro black holes would not be created from gravitational forces that exist with [normal] laboratory created Bose-Einstein Condensates (editor: as long as the BEC atoms continue to mutually repel such as with RB87, and for non-Bosenova implosions as far as I can determine), as detailed in the “The Alternate View” columns of John G. Cramer:

Bose-Einstein Condensation, A New Form of Matter by John G. Cramer, Alternate View Column AV-77

“The BEC is so compact and dense that, with sufficient atoms added, a mini-black hole of atomic size should form. The BEC of Wieman and Cornell contained only a few thousand atoms of rubidium. The first BEC is a long way from any danger of black hole formation.”