Will an artificial black hole destroy the earth?

[Ghoulish Delight]

http://www.livescience.com/forcesofnature/060919_black_holes.html

The long and short of this is, a massive accelerator is being built in Geneva. If predictions are correct, it will be creating microscopic black holes that should last for mere microseconds, barely enough time for them to go shooting off into space. And even if they are stable and have the right momentum to stay near earth, they'll be so small that they'll consume one proton per 100 hours.

I'm crossing my fingers, I think it'd be wicked awesome if they actually manage to produce black holes, no matter how small.

Meanwhile, is it really called the Large Har....oh, Hadron. Nevermind.

[Alex]

It would be cool, and validation for some very interesting ideas but even if they are produced as a by product, I wonder how they would detect them.

[Ghoulish Delight]

It would be cool, and validation for some very interesting ideas but even if they are produced as a by product, I wonder how they would detect them.
Good question. I wonder if the radiation would be too small/fast moving to detect. Or perhaps it will be a "simple" matter of applying the same kinds of gravitational distortion measurements that are used to "detect" large blackholes in space on a much smaller scale (no idea if there will be enough precission in the measurements for that).

[Kevy Baby]

Black Holes suck

[Alex]

Yes, but to the naked eye they don't suck all the way.

As for detecting, I don't believe that Hawkings Radiation has any kind of experimental evidence yet, so it is possible it doesn't exist (which, if it doesn't, allows the black holes to exist long enough for detection) and these are things that would only be black holes at the subatomic level so I can't imagine that gravitational distortion would be strong enough (but what do I know).

And if they're saying that these things are so small that they could pass through 500,000 miles of iron without hitting another object then that makes the odds of one running into whatever kind of detector there is pretty darn tiny.

Though maybe you could use photon detectors since if one got close enough to the black hole it its direction would be dramatically altered, but then again size poses a big problem since at this scale the Schwarzschild radius is going to be infinitesimally smaller than a proton.

I'll have to do some poking around the popular sources. Pretty much everything I know about the physics of black holes is about big ones.

[RStar]

Perhaps if they did manage to create a black hole, they are hoping it will pop up and anounce it's self. "Hello, I'm a black hole. How are you?"

But what do I know...

[Motorboat Cruiser]

"Hello, I'm a black hole. How are you?"


If you took out the word "black", you would have the standard greeting that scaeagles uses when he meets new people. ;)

[scaeagles]

I also have to chop the "le" off of "hole".

[wendybeth]

Scaeagles- the swirling black vortex of ho'ness, Destroyer of Appliances great and small.


Especially small.:D

[scaeagles]

Are you saying I destroyed MBC's small appliance?

[Motorboat Cruiser]

Are you saying I destroyed MBC's small appliance?

Well, I certainly didn't need any surgical repairs.

[CoasterMatt]

Are you saying I destroyed MBC's small appliance?
OMG!

I was in a particularly serious, bad news type phonecall when I read that - and started laughing inappropriately.

[Motorboat Cruiser]

OMG!

I was in a particularly serious, bad news type phonecall when I read that - and started laughing inappropriately.

I don't see anything that a sane person would see funny about that remark.

Oh...wait. Never mind.

;)