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.