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Re: Minimal Risks and Black Holes
April 8, 2008 by Halliday, 1 year 30 weeks ago
Comment id: 28681
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Renaisauce:
I sure wish there was some way to make a black hole in the lab, whether or not it "lasts". :-)
One of the best testbeds I can think of for a theory that would incorporate all of General Relativity as well as all of Quantum Mechanics would be a microscopic black hole. To actually be able to do experiments on such, I believe, would be a real boon to physics. (That is, of course, if it didn't get away from us. :-( )
Since cosmic ray energies far exceed anything mankind can hope to produce in the foreseeable future, let alone the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), I don't expect we'll create anything this Earth hasn't already seen. (Besides, there is absolutely no way we can prove that any micro black holes this Earth has experience were traveling at velocities such as not to be gravitationally captured.)
Personally, I look forward to the LHC. Historically, whenever we achieve a new energy regime we have discovered many unexpected particles (usually ones that we would just as soon have never seen, since their inclusion usually disrupts our nice tidy models :-) ). We may also not discover any scalar Higgs (though I would hope we do actually discover something that will work at least as well).
David