No matter the suggested odds.

If the world survives, I collect.

And if the world is destroyed, how could I be required to pay up?

In any case, I only know of one sure-fire way to create a black hole, and even then it only persists long enough to absorb roughly a two-meter radius of matter surrounding it before it decays, after connecting this circui

Because protons are composite entities with parts (partons) of high momentum, even a perfect head-on collision of protons is going to result in a random momentum for the center of mass of colliding partons with relativistic velocities being the most common result. ( Details in table 12 of appendix F to http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.3381 where the probability of a hypothetical stable neutral black hole created at LHC getting captured by earth varies from 0.0020% to 0.14% for D representing between 4 extra large dimensions and 7 extra large dimensions. )

And the reason not to worry about hypothetical black holes that might get made at the LHC is that if they could grow to eat the Earth or Moon or Sun even over the remaining life of the Sun as a G-class star, then similar black holes would have eaten all of the older and much denser objects objects in the sky like 120-million-year-old Sirius-B and neutron stars of great age. So either they cannot be made so casually, or they aren’t so catastrophically dangerous as some would have us think. That’s the strictly empirical argument, describe the danger mathematically and ask the question would we see what we would see if that math represented reality.

Indeed, if you don’t add special assumptions to make all the electric charge of the partons go away, the Earth and Moon themselves would not have survived these past billions of years of us not operating the LHC — life as we know it would never have existed if you assume the possibility of ordinary dangerous stable black holes of TeV-scale.

(After I post this, perhaps someone would tell me that we now have some specialized electronics where the design or use requires QED, a discipline of QFT, but I am ignorant of it as of now.)

Sorry, as one of those general publicans I fell I’m stuck far below the horizon here, but: did you by any chance think of tunnel diodes?

And I’m too lazy and ignorant to find out why mini-blackholes would have near-C velocities upon creation. My simpleton understanding was that they would be the product of a head-on collision between equal particles of near-C v at exactly opposite directions.

As long as we can be certain the little ones are leaving Earth forthwith, I’m not so worried. But what if one of them has zero relative velocity to begin with and a significant lifetime? That was the original question of this post, AIUI. If it has been answered it must have gone over my head…

Like the creationists, who deny the facts and logic of evolution under the logical fallacy that harming the public acceptance of theory of evolution helps bolster their pet description of creation, the anti-LHC proponents have many pet descriptions of destruction and are willing to quote-mine, use secondary sources in preference to primary sources, lie, and ignore good science and evidence which often they show not the slightest interest in understanding. Unlike the science of evolution, the work of particle and GR physicists leaves little marks on wider society.

Living things are extensively photographed for entertainment, people keep vertebrates of all stripes as pets, the facts of reproduction and DNA are popular. Digital information processing applications, such as word processing, are familiar and can be used a model of mutation, reproduction and common descent. The success of the evolution-driven biologist can be as dramatic as brainbow mice, as useful as WHO antibiotic guidelines, and as personal as appendectomy. Indeed, that man and animal can share some, but not all, medicines is a near and dear fact of evolution — But even biologists fall back on expert-only claims when it comes to taxonomy and in-lab evolution experiments leaving them vulnerable to “it’s still a fruit fly” so-what-ism.

The mathematics of complex numbers and abstract algebra are unfamiliar to accountants and not used by mechanical engineers. The meat-and-potatoes math of functional integration and intrinsic curvature of manifolds are even further removed from the lives of the non-specialist. The interpretation of observations of binary neutron stars and colliding galaxies, very high precision measurements of solar system bodies and particle detectors are needed to even make a case for the success of quantum field theory and general relativity. It’s a strong success but not dramatic (bending of light by thousands of a degree), not useful (atomic weapons and computation chemistry don’t depend on understanding detailed at this level), and not personal (it’s normal to get a physics B.S. without ever doing QFT or GR, although you are likely to hear of them).

GR has one PR success — black holes, the 1916 prediction which was too startling for Einstein himself to readily accept. Even there, black holes are remote, accessible only in fiction and “artist’s depictions.” QFT’s more modest PR successes are the Casimir force and Hawking evaporation. None of these are readily accessible to the home hobbyist, who has no X-ray or IR telescopes, no delicate balances and certainly no black holes of mass 100 billion tons or less. And since the day-to-day physics of the non-specialist person has no obvious relativistic, quantum, or non-Newtonian gravitational phenomena, high school courses have long focused on the Newtonian picture. While evolution is the core message of biology, physics can be viewed as Newtonian when far from the special cases far from everyday experience.

(After I post this, perhaps someone would tell me that we now have some specialized electronics where the design or use requires QED, a discipline of QFT, but I am ignorant of it as of now.)

So, I quote Feynman, not as an authority, but because the way he expresses thoughts which I have long wrestled with. There will always be science (evolutionary biology, physics) and science-flavored crap (creation science, quantum-consciousness double-speak) in the world. Science is successful because of doubt and testing, while a large class of people only want polemics to rest their faith on and reassurance of their own specialness. It is not the job of scientists, as scientists, to educate the latter group. The truths of science are not self-evident and not self-correcting but are built on the evidence of facts and experience, and no one can be versed in all of experience. We will always need scientists, as scientists, to generalize and apply this experience for us. But the meaty limits of the human brain, as the evolutionary biologist should recognize, has left us ill-suited to process predictive models so far removed daily experience. It is the specialized expert (M.D. specialist or GR researcher) to whom we must turn — even in the face of natural arrogance that we are “just as good” as them or our simian desire for comfort. Especially when the evidence is remote and the message is not central to our good-enough understanding of science for our everyday non-specialists.

The first of these three facts is probably a good thing!

The second is terrifying. The people who are going to (maybe) make (maybe) black holes that will (maybe) disappear before they can damage anything (maybe not) are leaderless and no one is issuing orders. I’m selling my Susse Chalet tomorrow!

The third is a disgrace and I’m afraid that quoting Feynmann does not get you out of it. Not in this day and age.

I promise you, if we evolutionary biologists acted this way we’d have had our nasty bits handed to us decades ago by the creationists. And we did, and they did and we learned.

The burden of [this] lecture is just to emphasize the fact that it is impossible to explain honestly the beauties of the law of nature in a a way that people can feel, without their having some deep understanding of mathematics. I am sorry, but this seems to be the case.

[A paragraph on the conceit that the symbols of mathematics are just a language and that a translation of them into basic English ought to be good enough for the above purpose.]

But I do not think it is possible, because mathematics is not just another language. Mathematics is a language plus reasoning; it is like a language plus logic. … For I can tell you that the force [of the sun’s gravity on the Earth] is directed towards the sun. I can also tell you, as I did, that the planet moves so that I draw a line from the sun to the planet, and draw another line later at some definite period, like three weeks, later, then the area that is swung out by the planet is exactly the same as it will be in the next three weeks, and the next three weeks, and so on as it goes around the sun. I can explain both of those statements carefully, but I cannot explain why they are both the same [statement].

– Richard Feynmann, “The Relation of Mathematics to Physics” in The Character of Physical Law (1965).

The heavy-lifting that physicists do is to box nature into as small a corner as possible, but the shape of that box is difficult to communicate in English. In layman’s terms, the physicist is basically unarmed since even the very simple of physics of the Giddings and Mangano paper, http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.3381 , gets twisted by reporters and anti-LHC forces. (One of them conflates primordial billion-ton hypothetical black holes with TeV-scale hypothetical black holes.) The physicist must choose to use the professional tone and language of the report or the seven-plus-or-minus-powerpoint-bullets of the soundbite generation. Having simplified the discussion for the lay audience, the anti-LHC forces then pile on an additional layer of improbability and then the physicist has to explain that those possibilities were already rejected.

c. 1800s The Earth (and universe) is ancient and expected to continue for a while
c. 1930s Physics is quantum in nature and conservation laws are local in time and space. Things made unmake themselves in colliders.
c. 1970s First arguments towards Hawking evaporation of black holes
c. 1999 4-D GR Black holes are scary — But can’t be made at colliders
c. 2002 N-D RS Black holes — assume quantum theory + large extra dimensions — might be made at colliders, but would not be dangerous since a) quantum processes are reversible and b) Hawking radiation says they decay fast
c. 2004 But what if there is no Hawking radiation? (quote-mining early Unruh and ignoring later Unruh.) — Then they would still not be dangerous since cosmic rays would easily form them and there would a background radiation of black holes of all different charges and there would be no Earth and no Moon.
c. 2007 But what if they were all neutral? Then your precious moon means nothing!
2008 Then there would be no old white dwarfs or old neutron stars.
2009 N-D RS black holes with extra large dimensions might live long enough to grow in mass. Does that make G&M wrong? No, since G&M already assumed stable black holes and do not rely on Hawking decay for their empirical demonstration of safety.

By shifting the goal posts, the anti-LHC forces have never proposed a model or contradicted an observation or even demonstrated that once formed a hypothetical LHC product would endanger anyone. They are organized around two principles — the LHC is big and the unknown is scary.

Physicists, on the other hand, aren’t organized at all. There is no “defense of physics” group. There is no leadership of the LHC which issues orders. There is no significant funding into particle and GR physics education of the general public.

Oops — Internet access going away. Catch you later.

Most physicists are more than happy to explain their work to anyone willing to listen and learn. But physics is hard and you have to put in the work.

You have stated and demonstrated my key argument. My point is, and it is nothing other than this: Physicists have not done very much of the heavy lifting in this area. They’ve left that to others, and this is done at their peril. This is a shame because a lot of good physics won’t get done because of this lack on the part of the profession.

There are of course popularizers and spokespeople out there, but on a day to day level the average person runs into something very different on the average day.

See? there you go again. Scientists are not “utterly ignorant” of black holes. A great deal is known about them, their entropy, spinning black holes, spinning charged black holes and even small black holes.

Conflating the inability to use theory to disprove a very very unlikely theory in a very narrow size range when it makes no difference anyway with “utter ignorance” is exactly the kind of dumb creationist trick I’m complaining about. By theory tiny black holes almost certainly do not exist. By empirical observation they aren’t a problem even if they do. Its that simple.

I would prefer that they do exist because that means new physics within obtainable energy ranges.

“Seriously, it is not a wonder that people keep asking questions. Physics, the science of all science, has rarely done much to explain itself. Admit that and fix it, that would be my advice.”

Asking questions is fine. Most physicists are more than happy to explain their work to anyone willing to listen and learn. But physics is hard and you have to put in the work. And the problem is with people who couldn’t buy a clue if they won the lottery who nevertheless insist they know enough to demand that the LHC be shut down.

I’m not a physicist but I love physics. It never ceases to amaze me how many real physicists are online willing to explain some detail of quantum physics, string theory or whatever to me. Specifically there has been a great deal of effort put into countering this black hole nonsense.