How far to go in the quest for knowledge?

Response to a comment after NPR reported that the Higgs boson search team is planning a big announcement.

Gareth Andrews: “...maybe we're not supposed/allowed to get there.“

If anyone can say why creation of very dense particles, if taken to the extreme, will not mean creation of miniature black holes, I would appreciate it.

If a miniature black hole were created, we may not know it (except, perhaps, as an otherwise unexplained loss of energy in the debris of a large hadron collision). It would not have the immediate effect of pulling everything on Earth into it, since the gravitational force would only be significant at an extremely small distance from the particle.

There have been gamma ray bursts observed with modern instruments that are of unknown origin. If some advanced civilization has already developed these particle accelerators and used them to produce black holes, then these mini black holes will likely have settled toward the center of whatever planet that unfortunate civilization inhabits. Over time, there will be interactions with other matter, and this will cause the black hole to become bigger. The effect of its gravitational field will increase, so that it will start pulling other material into it at an increasing rate. Then the whole planet is swallowed up by this manufactured black hole. The planet would be almost completely converted to gamma ray energy as it implodes.

http://gaiabrain.blogspot.com


JoeyN wrote: If you put enough energy in a small enough region, you can create a black hole. However, if the LHC creates a black hole by colliding two protons together, that black hole will be so tiny that it will have a vanishingly small chance of swallowing even a single electron during the entire lifetime of the universe. Who's to say what other hypothetical civilizations are doing, but it's not a concern on Earth, and I don't think it's probably a viable explanation for GRBs...


@Joey N.: I read that there are some GRBs that are EITHER a pair of colliding stars VERY far away, OR an asteroid hitting a neutron star more nearby.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/336531/title/Christmas_gamma-ray_burst_still_puzzles

In other words, there are GRBs of unknown energy and we cannot know their total energy unless we know their distance. In the case of these ambiguous signatures, the distance is not known. We cannot distinguish the signature of one event from the signature of another if we do not have a good estimate of the distance.

I suppose that the star-star collision at great distance and the asteroid-star collision at a relatively short distance and the imploding planet at a middle range could all have similar signatures.

Do you disagree?

A cure for what ails the planet:
http://gaiabrain.blogspot.com

Biological Model for Politics and Economics:
http://gaiabrain.blogspot.com/2007/09/gaia-brain-integration-of-human-society.html

Mon Jul 02 2012 12:40:28 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time)