Doomsday scenarios of the destruction of the Earth
by the LHC are believed to be almost impossible
due to research by Stephen Hawking.
Image: iStockphoto
Each atomic collision in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will release an amount of energy equal to colliding mosquitoes, according to a report into the safety of the $3 billion euro atom smasher recreating the Big Bang.
Unfortunately, the study has done little to allay the fears of some people who suggest the near-light speed collisions will give birth to hypothetical anomalies such as vacuum bubbles, magnetic monopoles, strangelets and, worst of all, microscopic black holes.
"The LHC reproduces in the laboratory, under controlled conditions, collisions at centre-of-mass energies less than those reached in the atmosphere by some of the cosmic rays that have been bombarding the Earth for billions of years," it states. "Any microscopic black holes produced at the LHC are expected to decay by Hawking radiation (they evaporate) before they reach the detectors."
Though most scientists believe in Hawking radiation, put forward by Stephen Hawking in the 1970s, there is no experiment sensitive enough to find direct evidence for it. However, the hope is that the Cambridge scientist is correct in saying mini-holes will exist only for a moment, decaying or evaporating almost immediately.
Physicists from RHIC estimate the smallest possible black hole to be 10m to 35m (the so-called Planck length), with smaller holes wiped out by quantum fluctuations in space-time around them.
Such a black hole would weigh 10 micrograms, about the same as a speck of dust. To create such a mass requires energies which are far beyond what is possible today - 1019 Giga-electronvolts. An accelerator as big as the galaxy would be required to produce this amount of energy.
Even if you could produce such energy, the black hole would not be big enough to swallow the Earth. Such a tiny black hole would evaporate in less than 60 seconds in a blast of Hawking radiation.
Colliding particles should emit thermal particles similar to the Hawking radiation emitted by a black hole. Since Hawking radiation is the cause of black hole decay, not formation, scientists believe atom smashers such as the RHIC and Large Hadron Collider cannot produce a real hole.
The LHC is designed to collide pairs of protons, each with energies of 7 TeV, or Teraelectron volts. When beams collide, the energy of the collision is the sum of the energies of the two beams, so when two protons collide the collision energy will be 14 TeV.
One TeV is equal to about the energy of motion of a flying mosquito – the LHC squeezes this energy into a space about a million million times smaller than a mosquito.
The concerns over LHC mirror those of residents living near the Brookhaven Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), in Upton, New York. They have been debating the possible dangers of the collider since it began running experiments in 2000.
In October 1999, the Long Island laboratory dismissed any threat after convening a committee to investigate the safety of each of the speculative disaster scenarios including black holes and alternative universes.
Brookhaven Director John H. Marburger III declared "Nature has been creating collisions of energies comparable to those at RHIC for billions of years, and there is no evidence of any kind of disaster related to those collisions.
"RHIC does not take us beyond the limits of natural phenomena. It brings a rare phenomenon into the view of our instruments so we can puzzle out its inner workings."
The Brookhaven safety report is available here.
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