Don’t worry! Though black holes may sound scary, microscopic black holes, the type that could hypothetically be produced by high-energy particle collisions such as this, would pretty much instantaneously (in approximately 10-27 seconds) evaporate due to the emission of Hawking radiation, before they could “suck up” anything. Cosmic rays of far higher intensities than what we could produce routinely collide with atoms in Earth’s atmosphere, so microscopic black holes could be happening daily in our atmosphere, we just never see them because they’re far too small and evaporate instantly.
Hey you seem pretty knowledgeable so I’m gonna just ask - if these types of events happen regularly in earth’s atmosphere, why build particle colliders at all? Is it just to have control over when they’re triggered and to be able to observe the results? If so, wouldn’t it help to just launch more satellites that can observe when these things happen in the atmosphere? Sorry for the dumb questions, I’m very much a layman.
Yup! It’s so they can view what happens when these particles collide as the collisions happen, using specialized detectors. The ATLAS detector at CERN weighs 7,000 tons and is huge.
These reactions in the atmosphere happen very fast and are a bit chaotic. When a primary cosmic ray hits an atom in our atmosphere, it then sets off a chain reaction similar to billiard balls, resulting in “air showers”, which are cascades of subatomic particles, such as hadrons, photons, muons, electrons, as well as ionized nuclei. The colliders allow physicists to view these kinds of reactions under controlled conditions right as the reactions happen, and can adjust things such as the energies. There’s an array of detectors in Argentina which can detect the particles released by an air shower
Well no danger of that. We certainly cannot do it on terrestrial scales. No way, no how. Not even with fusion and a collider ring wrapped around the equator. It still requires vastly higher energies.
Even if we could make a kugelblitz black hole right here, it would instantly fall out of reach through the Earth while barely interacting at all with any other particles. On the Planck scale, particles are mostly empty space. We wouldn’t even get to study it.
The best way to build one is to surround a star with millions of orbital mirrors, then focus all the light onto a single point in space, with an accuracy of nanometers, if not picometers. Focusing enough energy on a single point will cause a tiny black hole to form. It’s probably impossible to do by accident.
There are plenty of natural particles colliders, such as black holes or very dense stars, that are way more powerful than our engineered particle colliders, which (observationally) don’t create black holes around them
Similar reactions produced by particle accelerators are constantly happening all around us, and isn’t just limited to extreme conditions like around black holes. This is just the same thing but at a much smaller and more controlled scale, and last I checked the sun hasn’t produced any world ending black holes despite the far more extreme reactions constantly happening within it. A man even survived a high energy proton beam from one of those accelerators passing through his brain and was able to continue his career in quantum physics, so at that point I doubt they’re capable of anything world ending.
There’s 1 in a trillion trillion chance! So we should be glad we’re not all beautiful beach body people married to the most wonderful and irresistibly sexy megalonymphomaniac people that just want to hump us every single second of the rest of our lives in all possible ways, all of us 8 billion people together. Because if that ever happened, it could only mean one thing, the end of the world as we know it would be coming in the form of a tiny black hole.
Hopefully they can finally manufacture black holes. Because that would be totally safe for everyone 😉.
Don’t worry! Though black holes may sound scary, microscopic black holes, the type that could hypothetically be produced by high-energy particle collisions such as this, would pretty much instantaneously (in approximately 10-27 seconds) evaporate due to the emission of Hawking radiation, before they could “suck up” anything. Cosmic rays of far higher intensities than what we could produce routinely collide with atoms in Earth’s atmosphere, so microscopic black holes could be happening daily in our atmosphere, we just never see them because they’re far too small and evaporate instantly.
Hey you seem pretty knowledgeable so I’m gonna just ask - if these types of events happen regularly in earth’s atmosphere, why build particle colliders at all? Is it just to have control over when they’re triggered and to be able to observe the results? If so, wouldn’t it help to just launch more satellites that can observe when these things happen in the atmosphere? Sorry for the dumb questions, I’m very much a layman.
Yup! It’s so they can view what happens when these particles collide as the collisions happen, using specialized detectors. The ATLAS detector at CERN weighs 7,000 tons and is huge.
These reactions in the atmosphere happen very fast and are a bit chaotic. When a primary cosmic ray hits an atom in our atmosphere, it then sets off a chain reaction similar to billiard balls, resulting in “air showers”, which are cascades of subatomic particles, such as hadrons, photons, muons, electrons, as well as ionized nuclei. The colliders allow physicists to view these kinds of reactions under controlled conditions right as the reactions happen, and can adjust things such as the energies. There’s an array of detectors in Argentina which can detect the particles released by an air shower
Maybe that’s what is happening to the ozone layer.
Well no danger of that. We certainly cannot do it on terrestrial scales. No way, no how. Not even with fusion and a collider ring wrapped around the equator. It still requires vastly higher energies.
Even if we could make a kugelblitz black hole right here, it would instantly fall out of reach through the Earth while barely interacting at all with any other particles. On the Planck scale, particles are mostly empty space. We wouldn’t even get to study it.
The best way to build one is to surround a star with millions of orbital mirrors, then focus all the light onto a single point in space, with an accuracy of nanometers, if not picometers. Focusing enough energy on a single point will cause a tiny black hole to form. It’s probably impossible to do by accident.
I’ll show you my kugelblitz black hole.
There are plenty of natural particles colliders, such as black holes or very dense stars, that are way more powerful than our engineered particle colliders, which (observationally) don’t create black holes around them
They posit that yes, black holes could be formed, but they’re so small they evaporate pretty much instantly. They don’t have the mass to survive.
Similar reactions produced by particle accelerators are constantly happening all around us, and isn’t just limited to extreme conditions like around black holes. This is just the same thing but at a much smaller and more controlled scale, and last I checked the sun hasn’t produced any world ending black holes despite the far more extreme reactions constantly happening within it. A man even survived a high energy proton beam from one of those accelerators passing through his brain and was able to continue his career in quantum physics, so at that point I doubt they’re capable of anything world ending.
There’s 1 in a trillion trillion chance! So we should be glad we’re not all beautiful beach body people married to the most wonderful and irresistibly sexy megalonymphomaniac people that just want to hump us every single second of the rest of our lives in all possible ways, all of us 8 billion people together. Because if that ever happened, it could only mean one thing, the end of the world as we know it would be coming in the form of a tiny black hole.