Cuppacafe

So, Did you hear the story about the team of scientists that created a super particle accelerator that in turn created a micro-black hole? Yeah, you know the story, its the one where they wind up creating this black hole that grows exponentially into an Earth-eating behemoth, ultimately destroying all life as we know it.

Nope, it isn’t the latest Roland Emmerich Earth-destroying disaster flick, it is basically what some scientists though would happen when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) when on-line back in September of 2008, only it (obviously) didn’t quite happen that way. Well, we now know that the Earth-munching, LHC-generated black hole theory has more flaws in it than Europa’s crust, but scientists do think the next-generation particle accelerator could generate tiny black holes.

This is actually rather exciting. If micro-black holes are generated after the high-energy collisions inside the LHC, they could provide the first experimental evidence of Hawking Radiation, the only radiation predicted to be emitted from a black hole's event horizon. If the radiation predicted by Stephen Hawking is discovered (via the detection of evaporating black holes), a Nobel Prize for Physics wouldn't be far away.

To learn more about the LHC go here. To read about the end of the world as we know it go here.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 13th, 2009 at 10:37 pm and is filed under Movies, Out of this World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.