Sept. 10, 2008 -- Today officials at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, formally switched on the Large Hadron Collider, the so-called "doomsday machine" under Geneva, Switzerland that will smash protons against protons with so much force that critics say it could create a black hole.
CERN scientists say that a black hole is "virtually impossible." Martin Rees, a U.K. physicist, has put the odds of a CERN black hole at one in 50 million. Cynics have pointed out that those odds are about the same as some state-sponsored lotteries.
But when the fate of the world is at stake any risk is too great a risk, contend two groups, one in the United States and one in Europe, who are suing to stop the LHC from operating. Other people have threatened to take matters into their own hands, issuing death threats to CERN scientists and theoretical physicists.
Frank Wilczek, the 2004 Nobel Prize winner and a professor of theoretical physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is one of the scientists who has received death threats. He points out there are massive black holes and then there are smaller, much less destructive black holes.
According to Wilzcek, fears of an Earth-gobbling black hole are grounded in the popular idea that all black holes are galactic monsters just waiting for the chance to gobble up any nearby star or planet that gets too close.
While supermassive black holes, like the one at the center of our galaxy, do gobble up stars and planets, microscopic black holes, like the ones the LHC could create, would look and act completely differently.
"It's like we only had one word for every animal out there," said Wilczek. "It's like they had elephants in mind when they came up with the word 'animal.' But little amoebas are animals too."
"The word is the same but the object is very different from the standard image that people think of."
If (and that remains a big "if") the LHC creates a black hole it will be extremely tiny, much smaller than a single atom, said Wilzcek. Its mass will be the same as the two protons that created it. Its range will be small -- only a few times the diameter of the two protons.
According to Wilczek, that's too small for the baby black hole to eat enough particles to grow to any real size. With no food, the black hole will simply wink out of existence in a fraction of a second.
To create a stable black hole, one capable of consuming the Earth, the black hole would have to be several hundred tons. A LHC-generated black hole would weigh a tiny fraction of a gram.
So what impact would a small, LHC-generated black hole have?
Wilczek says the only likely effect is that all of the quarks and other particles produced in the collisions will zoom away a fraction of a second slower than they normally would have. The only ones who would even notice that a black hole was there would be the CERN scientists looking at their screens and watching the data.
That means even if a black hole were created in Geneva it would have no effect on humanity at large. But, for curiosity's sake, just what would happen to someone if they were dropped into a supermassive black hole, like the one at the center of the galaxy?
"At first they might not even notice," said Wilczek. "We could be in a black hole right now and we wouldn't even know it," since information can't escape a black hole.
Eventually, however, the person would start to feel the forces. The huge differences in gravity in the black hole would slowly stretch a person out while simultaneously compressing his or her sides. Eventually, a person would stretch out like a strand of spaghetti.
That's a fearsome image, but it won't happen at CERN. CERN's internal reports have discredited the possibility, and outside experts agree: CERN is safe. And while Wilczek sees no logic or credence in the alarming rumors surrounding CERN, he does see an upside to all of the attention the experiment is gathering.
"People can start to think about black holes, and hopefully that will suck them into thinking about the really exciting science that will happen at CERN,' said Wilczek.
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