3 ms·

To maxerickson: I know what you mean, but I still think you have to look at the numbers. It seems plausible to me that the black hole might be so small that i

To maxerickson: I know what you mean, but I still think you have to look at the numbers. It seems plausible to me that the black hole might be so small that it would take literally millions of years or more to consume enough mass to become a threat. And that might even depend a lot on chance since most particles would just drift by it without passing inside of its event horizon since the force of gravity has very little effect at those scales.

dietrichepp 12y ago
Right, but if that were possible, it would have already happened. Cosmic rays hitting the Earth's upper atmosphere can already have much, much more energy than the LHC achieves. So the LHC is being ramped up to produce 13 TeV collisions... but we've measured cosmic ray impacts as high as 300,000,000 TeV. That was the so-called "oh my god particle", which had as much kinetic energy as a 60mph baseball, even though it was probably just a single proton. Sure, it's an outlier, but you can look at the overall distribution of cosmic ray flux: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray#/media/File:Cosmic_ray_flux_versus_particle_energy.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray#/media/File:Cosmic_r... Let's move beyond "seems plausible" and try to work with "supported by the data".
- katabatic 12y ago
  Thank goodness 60mph+ baseballs don't annihilate matter when they impact baseball bats!
- ufmace 12y ago
  Indeed. The LHC collisions aren't special because they're particularly high-powered. They're special because they take place precisely in the center of an enormous particle detector. And have a precisely known energy level and composition. Far higher energy stuff than anything we can dream of producing in a lab happens all over the world all the time. And the stuff that's documented now is only the things that have happened since we started being able to detect and measure it.

dietrichepp 12y ago

Right, but if that were possible, it would have already happened. Cosmic rays hitting the Earth's upper atmosphere can already have much, much more energy than the LHC achieves. So the LHC is being ramped up to produce 13 TeV collisions... but we've measured cosmic ray impacts as high as 300,000,000 TeV. That was the so-called "oh my god particle", which had as much kinetic energy as a 60mph baseball, even though it was probably just a single proton. Sure, it's an outlier, but you can look at the overall distribution of cosmic ray flux: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray#/media/File:Cosmic_ray_flux_versus_particle_energy.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray#/media/File:Cosmic_r... Let's move beyond "seems plausible" and try to work with "supported by the data".

katabatic 12y ago
Thank goodness 60mph+ baseballs don't annihilate matter when they impact baseball bats!
ufmace 12y ago
Indeed. The LHC collisions aren't special because they're particularly high-powered. They're special because they take place precisely in the center of an enormous particle detector. And have a precisely known energy level and composition. Far higher energy stuff than anything we can dream of producing in a lab happens all over the world all the time. And the stuff that's documented now is only the things that have happened since we started being able to detect and measure it.