LHC Facts

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?