Black Hole in a Lab

March 17, 2005 10:57 AM

Ever Read Hyperion, by Simmons? In that story, the earth was accidentally destroyed by a man-made black hole. We are now one step closer. Physicists may have created a black hole in a lab at the RHIC (Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider). H. Nastase has posted a paper on the possibility. Fascinating discovery, but there's no real danger of destroying the earth. This might be a good time to check up on some of the myths surrounding black holes. (Found via that other site, /.)
posted by teece (29 comments total)

Awesome. I can't wait to get that farcaster installed in my front door. All hail the machines!
posted by Sangermaine at 11:39 AM on March 17, 2005

There was one great Slashdot comment that helps put the scope of the problem into perspective.

That having been said, wouldn't the safer course be to conduct these experiments on a research space station of some sort, say at one of the Lagrange points between the Earth and the Moon? I realize just how massive most particle accelators are, but still it seems that the best course would be to establish an orbital hot lab until we're a trifle more certain of our physics models.
posted by Ryvar at 11:47 AM on March 17, 2005

Even black holes don't create mass out of nothing. A black hole generated from two gold nuclei has the mass (and the gravitational attraction) of two gold nuclei. It's much smaller than two gold nuclei under ordinary conditions--there's no "conservation of size" law in physics--but it's no more massive than the original two nuclei.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 12:00 PM on March 17, 2005

Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion, two of my top 10 books of all fucking time. the Endymion crap that followed them up sucked though.

supposedly Scorsese has bought the rights, and plans on making a film out of the whole series glommed together, with fucking dicaprio as raul endymion.

what a waste that's gonna be. hope it never gets made.
posted by jimjam at 12:02 PM on March 17, 2005

Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion, two of my top 10 books of all fucking time. the Endymion crap that followed them up sucked though.

Agreed. Things got so contrived and convoluted by the last third of Rise of Endymion that there was a scene where a character fielded questions pitched to her by all the other characters from the series like some lame dramatic dialogue FAQ.
posted by sourwookie at 12:16 PM on March 17, 2005

Interesting, thanks!
posted by sciurus at 12:18 PM on March 17, 2005

If I remember correctly the destruction of the Earth by the black hole was in fact not accidental but done by the AIs. Anyone able to confirm or deny this?
posted by Vaska at 12:24 PM on March 17, 2005

Oh, you might be right, Vaska, but that's sort of a plot spoiler, don't you think?

Also, in relation to this link discussing whether string theory predicts anything, I am fascinated by the end of the (very dense) paper by Nastase:

Then RHIC is really a string theory testing machine, that analyzes the formation and decay of dual black holes, and giving information about the black hole interior. Probing the formation and decay with external particles seems hard, but a priori not impossible. The same applies for the formation of bound states of the potential

posted by teece at 12:30 PM on March 17, 2005

Teece : Ah crap, didn't even think about that. Everyone I know has read Hyperion so the thought that people exist who haven't gotten around to it yet didn't enter into my head.
posted by Vaska at 12:40 PM on March 17, 2005

I just wish Simmons had thought more about what farcasters would be good for. F'r'instance, if you surrounded your warship with 4 intersecting farcaster portals in a tetrahedral array, you'd have impenetrable armor -- missiles and zaps that would have hit you go Somewhere Else.

And if you had a farcaster portal installed up yer bum or in your urethra, you wouldn't have to be continent any more and could use that brainpower for something else. As an added bonus, you could send the hmmm... so on and so on.... to someone you don't like very much.

See also David Brin, Earth, for singularities loose in the lithosphere causing hijinks as they move around.

vaska: [ROT13] Gur NVf gubhtug gurl qrfgeblrq vg, ohg ernyyl gur Yvbaf naq Gvtref naq Ornef zbirq vg vagb gur shgher; vg nccrnef ntnva ng gur raq bs Evfr bs Raqlzvba nsgre nyy gur ernyyl tbqsbefnxrayl fghcvq fuvg unccraf. [/ROT13]
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 12:48 PM on March 17, 2005

I just wish Simmons had thought more about what farcasters would be good for. F'r'instance, if you surrounded your warship with 4 intersecting farcaster portals in a tetrahedral array, you'd have impenetrable armor -- missiles and zaps that would have hit you go Somewhere Else.

Ah, but then how does your warship ever fire back at anybody?
posted by COBRA! at 12:50 PM on March 17, 2005

Isn't this occurence one of the steps in the John Titor thing?
posted by sandking at 12:51 PM on March 17, 2005

Reading Hyperion right now and loving it. Now I will ignore everything in this post.
posted by panoptican at 1:10 PM on March 17, 2005

Ah, but then how does your warship ever fire back at anybody?

People had one-directional portals, or just drop it for that millisecond that you need to let your weapon out.

Or don't, and only use the farcaster armor when you're running like hell.

Also: open up a portal between the Other Guy's ships, cities, whatever, and a nearby stellar core.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 1:23 PM on March 17, 2005

ROU_Xenophobe : Thanks. I've got the two Endymion books on my shelf to be read, but I'm rather leery of them having been so fond of Hyperion and hearing many friends castigate them.
posted by Vaska at 1:25 PM on March 17, 2005

I never did finish Hyperion, and I've not been able to find it anywhere. Except online. Now. Because of you. Because I'd always forgot to look for it online. That's it.

Thanks much, teece.
posted by The Great Big Mulp at 1:25 PM on March 17, 2005

Quantum Diarist Peter Steinberg works at RHIC and in this post explains that the news reporting on this paper are a bit overstated. He writes:

No-one I have ever spoken to has suggested that this black hole can or does act like a traditional black hole in our observed universe.

posted by verysleeping at 2:16 PM on March 17, 2005

If you made a quantum black hole in a lab and had containment accident, assuming is mass isn't catastrophically large to start with, what would happen? Would it drop to the floor, go through it, and so on until it came to rest in the center of the earth and continued sucking in matter until the earth effectively imploded?

Wow.
posted by alumshubby at 2:26 PM on March 17, 2005

Jeez. I just finished reading Hyperion last week. This whole black hole thing would be cool, if we were already occupying 200 different worlds and heavily dependent on an independent AI.
posted by graventy at 2:28 PM on March 17, 2005

The Queendom of Sol series has some interesting ideas about the technological possibilities black holes slightly smaller than protons. He makes the argument that such objects would be pretty much stable and unable to grab protons and neutrons due to the exclusion principle.

In fact, New Scientist suggested about two years ago that primordial black holes may still be in existence masquerading as super-heavy charged particles.

The Peter Steinberg post is pretty critical for revealing how much is misunderstood about theoretical physics. The claim is not that blackholes were actually made, but that the interaction might be a bit easier to model if the particles were treated as black holes in 10-d space. This is not a big deal because high school physics involves treating the earth and a baseball as point singularities moving in 1d or 2d space.

Another factoid that should yield some comfort is that the most powerful colliders still don't match the energy of a small minority of cosmic-ray events.

Alumshubby: Most likely, just drop to the first surface and stay there until it evaporates in a shower of exotics. Quite seriously, it would still have a charge, and strength of the EM force between two particles is huge compared to gravity.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 3:06 PM on March 17, 2005

I've got the two Endymion books on my shelf to be read, but I'm rather leery of them

Oh, give 'em a try when you're bored and don't have much else to read.

I mean, they're pretty bad. But they have a few fun spots -- the newer version of the Catholic Church and soldiers in the church's army and suchlike. And even when they're bad -- and they get pretty eye-rolling at times, especially when they forget continuity with the first 2 books -- they're just plain-old bad. They don't reach back through time to sully the first books the way that the Clarke/Lee Rama abominations do.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 3:09 PM on March 17, 2005

If you made a quantum black hole in a lab and had containment accident, assuming is mass isn't catastrophically large to start with, what would happen? Would it drop to the floor, go through it, and so on until it came to rest in the center of the earth and continued sucking in matter until the earth effectively imploded?

Wow.

Define "isn't catastrophically large to start with."

If it's of sufficient mass to start grabbing surrounding atoms, etc., we're in trouble.

Otherwise, what would happen is that the black hole would evaporate almost instantly due to Hawking radiation - the less massive a blackhole is, the more quickly it evaporates.
posted by Ryvar at 3:22 PM on March 17, 2005

The definitive site on how to destroy the Earth lists "Sucked into a microscopic black hole" as method #3.
posted by WestCoaster at 4:29 PM on March 17, 2005

****SPOILER*** (For those who haven't read Birn's Earth)


If you made a quantum black hole Would it drop to the floor, go through it, and so on until it came to rest in the center of the earth and continued sucking in matter until the earth effectively imploded?


IIRC, Brin suggests that a slightly larger BH would fall towards the center of the Earth, but not stop there. Instead it would pass the center and keep going, losing velocity until it paused near the Earth's surface and started down again. The rotation of the Earth would make the eventual path look like the tracings of a 3D Harmonograph and the Earth's core look like Swiss cheese.

Is this scenario possible?
posted by Enron Hubbard at 6:09 AM on March 18, 2005

It might not be a proper harmonograph because the mass of the black hole itself would constantly be increasing - and not in a linear fashion. Otherwise that sounds pretty reasonable.
posted by Ryvar at 6:45 AM on March 18, 2005

Ever Read Hyperion, by Hölderlin...?
posted by Zurishaddai at 7:34 AM on March 18, 2005

Ok, my Deutsch is pretty pathetic, Zurishaddai, but that title would translate roughly as "Hyperion or the Hemit of Greece?"

Interestingly, the Simmons book is "inspired" by the Keats poem "Hyperion" which sets out to to tell the tale of the Greek Hyperion. It even ends with the same line "On he flared..." and is meant to be incomplete at its ending, as the Keats poem was.

Enron Hubbard: Is this scenario possible? That would actually be fairly hard to figure. The equations of motion of a black hole cavorting about through the earth would be pretty challenging, as you would have decent bit of dM/dt which complicates the hell out of things (not to mention that whole general relativity mess, which is not child's play math). From a Newtonian view, what you describe seems accurate, but I would not be convinced that the GR model would give the same (or similar) answer unless I saw the calculations.
posted by teece at 12:00 PM on March 18, 2005

teece: Wouldn't you also have to factor in conservation of momentum each time it absorbed something else? That would slow it down somewhat.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 2:02 PM on March 18, 2005

I think the idea of a microscopic black hole destroying a planet was first covered by Larry Niven in the short story The Hole Man in 1975.
posted by Iax at 2:10 PM on March 18, 2005