3 ms·
Should we be worried about creating a black hole?
Let's just say that I sleep well at night knowing that my fellow physicists are busy slamming atomic nuclei together at near the speed of light. There are plenty of subatomic fireworks in those big accelerators, but probably not any black holes. We're not even sure we'll rip open such a hole in space-time — that prediction is based on a narrow class of speculative theories, which may or may not (let's just go with "not" for the time being) be true. So should we be worried about creating a black hole?
- schoen 9y agoThis is extensively discussed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_accelerator#Black_hole_production_and_public_safety_concerns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_accelerator#Black_hol... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_of_high-energy_particle_collision_experiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_of_high-energy_particle... (maybe HN readers would like to continue the discussion)
- Gibbon1 9y agoWell there is the cosmic ray 'oh my god particle' with a energy of 48 joules. Or 3×10^8 TeV. That hit the upper atmosphere in 1991 and we didn't all die. The LHC I think the max energy is ~10 TeV.