Fear to Halt Scientific Progress Once Again?

Cunning as Zeus
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The planet won't miss us because the planet won't be here if we mess this up. I have faith that these guys know what they're doing, though, and I'm sure they enjoy living as much as the next guy.
 
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when you think about it, black holes ARE tiny. even then it takes a relatively short time for them to decay and disappear. now if you compare a black holes already pinsize nature, these blackholes that would be made would almost be non-existent. in short, we havent invented a unit of time short enough to show how long these things would be in existence.
We have
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_time :p
 
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oh, sweet. us humans out-do ourselves yet again.
And for the record, normal black holes aren't exactly tiny. Neither are supermassive black holes.
isnt a singularity only millimeters in diameter?
 

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I read up on this story a little bit and it turns out their suing them in a Hawaii court. Considering that this machine and these scientists are based in Europe, I would think it wouldn't matter what this court rules, they have no jurisdiction.
 
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The black hole they'll be creating will be extremely weak, extremely small and will dissipate in a fraction of a second.

No danger involved.
Well.. thats only based on the theory of Hawking radiation, right? And if so... Hawking radiation hasn't been a proven law yet (atleast as far as i know of), so were not positive that the black holes will evaporate.
 
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well hawking radiation may be a theory but only because its not proven. without hawking radiation black holes defy certain laws.
 
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oh, sweet. us humans out-do ourselves yet again.


isnt a singularity only millimeters in diameter?
The event horizon is included when people speak of black holes. If I were to say black hole X has a size of 20 kilometers, I'm saying the event horizon is 20 kilometers from the black hole's center. A black hole the size of the Sun has a radius of 2.9 km and a black hole of 5 solar masses has a radius of 15 km. Supermassive black holes of millions of solar masses are out there, doing whatever it is they do. Do the math and we have ourselves one hell of a hole.

So yeah, black holes aren't exactly tiny.

@ Sub: If I remember correctly, the parts for the machine were made by Americans, so that somehow gives our courts the right to muck things up.

@ Walmart: Black holes were thought to have existed long before we had the capabilities and know-how to detect them. I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that they're right. If somehow everything we know is completely and utterly wrong and the black hole doesn't disappear or it grows and swallows the earth, we won't be around to cry about it so no harm done.
 
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@ Walmart: Black holes were thought to have existed long before we had the capabilities and know-how to detect them. I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that they're right. If somehow everything we know is completely and utterly wrong and the black hole doesn't disappear or it grows and swallows the earth, we won't be around to cry about it so no harm done.
Heh.. guess i cant complain about that.
 
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all a black hole is is the gravitational field from matter left over from a collapsed star, where do you guys come up with these crazy theories?

Its the same thing as having a sun, minus the energy the sun would be eimitting outward.
 
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For anything to become a black hole, you would need a ****load of mass. 2 particles colliding with eachother generates energy, not mass. And even though E=MC2 explains how mass can be converted to energy, and vice versa. It also explains you would need an incredible amount of energy, and a way to convert it to mass. Something this device would probably be incapable of doing. To create a black hole, you would need more energy than our sun currently has. (Our sun will not collapse in a black hole) I'd be pretty amazed if this thing would be able to make a mini-black hole. Because then we could probably forget about cold fusion. We would not have any energy problems ever again. You would probably have invented some kind of Zero Point energy then.
 
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Eh...no. It's quite feasible to create a black hole, just not with this device. The job would require something more powerful, but not something so powerful that we'd be creating mini suns (and they certainly wouldn't be sustainable) and then having them cave in on themselves. Read the last link I posted for more information.

In any case, the device poses no real danger to any of us and in the event a mini black hole was created, it would promptly fade out of existence.
 
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God this still just so dumb..




BLACK HOLES DO NOT WORK THAT WAY!




all that this will end up doing is delaying the stuff we are going to learn from the CERN
 
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For anything to become a black hole, you would need a ****load of mass. 2 particles colliding with eachother generates energy, not mass. And even though E=MC2 explains how mass can be converted to energy, and vice versa. It also explains you would need an incredible amount of energy, and a way to convert it to mass. Something this device would probably be incapable of doing. To create a black hole, you would need more energy than our sun currently has. (Our sun will not collapse in a black hole) I'd be pretty amazed if this thing would be able to make a mini-black hole. Because then we could probably forget about cold fusion. We would not have any energy problems ever again. You would probably have invented some kind of Zero Point energy then.
Normally, this is true. However, energy is equivalent to mass. If you put enough energy in one spot, you can create black holes. It's (theoretically) possible to create black holes with enough intense laser-fire onto a single point.

Sidenote: Someone asked earlier, "Isn't a singularity only a few millimeters across?" and someone responded "black holes can be quite large."

A singularity is a single point at the center of a black hole, a point of infinite density. It has no measurable size; it's infinitely small and infinitely dense. The event horizon, the point surrounding the singularity at which not even light can escape, has a definite size, depending on the mass of the black hole.
 
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The event horizon is included when people speak of black holes. If I were to say black hole X has a size of 20 kilometers, I'm saying the event horizon is 20 kilometers from the black hole's center. A black hole the size of the Sun has a radius of 2.9 km and a black hole of 5 solar masses has a radius of 15 km. Supermassive black holes of millions of solar masses are out there, doing whatever it is they do. Do the math and we have ourselves one hell of a hole.

So yeah, black holes aren't exactly tiny.
Astronomers typically determine the size of a black hole by calculating the distance of the event horizon from the singularity. Classical physics basically says the size of a singularity is 0, but when quantum physics is added to the mix, singularities have a definite size. For example, the size of the singularity that created our current Universe is said to have been about the size of a dime.
 
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Astronomers typically determine the size of a black hole by calculating the distance of the event horizon from the singularity. Classical physics basically says the size of a singularity is 0, but when quantum physics is added to the mix, singularities have a definite size. For example, the size of the singularity that created our current Universe is said to have been about the size of a dime.
Upon searching more for this matter, I came across the same source I assume you used: http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/040527a.html.

Interesting.. I'm reasonably knowledgable as far as astronomy and quantum physics are concerned, and I'd never heard about this. Not even from any of Hawking's books.
 
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I used an astronomy textbook I stole in high school, but the wording is pretty much exactly the same as in the link. I was really only taught that a singularity isn't a physical thing but the point where the laws of the Universe break down (the creation of the Universe being one such singularity, since none of the laws apply to whatever came before the big bang or whatever brought the Universe into existence). The book doesn't say how they went about measuring the singularity. Just that they did. I followed your link to this site: http://cosmology.berkeley.edu/Education/IUP/Big_Bang_Primer.html, but again, it doesn't explain how they went about measuring it.
 
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[ame="http://youtube.com/watch?v=0Fg16j5hbvY"]YouTube - The God Particle[/ame]
 
Cunning as Zeus
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The comments in that video are hysterical.
 

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