Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Renowned Cosmologist Professor Martin Rees thinks a particle accelerator experiment gone awry could destroy the world – though there are good reasons to doubt the significance of this risk.
Earth could shrink if black hole experiments fail, astronomer warns
By Lauren Fruen, The Sun
October 2, 2018…
Professor Lord Martin Rees has said a “doomsday scenario” could see our planet reduced to 330 feet across if particle accelerator experiments mess up.
The respected astronomer made the outlandish warning in his new book, “On The Future: Prospects for Humanity.”
…
The Telegraph reports how Rees also claims “a black hole could form and then suck in everything around it.”
Lord Rees added: “The second scary possibility is that the quarks would reassemble themselves into compressed objects called strangelets.”
“That in itself would be harmless. However, under some hypotheses a strangelet could, by contagion, convert anything else it encounters into a new form of matter, transforming the entire earth in a hyperdense sphere about one hundred meters (328 feet) across.”
A third danger is that the particle accelerators could destroy the Earth by a “catastrophe that engulfs space itself,” according to the scientist.
…
Read more: https://nypost.com/2018/10/02/earth-could-shrink-if-black-hole-experiments-fail-astronomer-warns/
Fun though it is to contemplate these outlandish possibilities, there is a good reason to doubt whether any of these possibilities are a significant risk.
Every day the Earth is bombarded by untold billions of cosmic ray particles emitted long ago by violent distant cosmic events such as the formation of black holes. Many of the particles which strike the Earth are orders of magnitude more energetic than anything we are ever likely to produce. Some particles like the infamous “Oh-my-god” particle which struck Earth in 1991 with an energy of 3×10^8 TeV, hitting us at 99.99999999999999999999951% of the speed of light defy explanation – we shall likely never find a way to produce particle energies of that magnitude (for comparison the Large Hadron Collider, Earth’s most powerful particle accelerator, produces particles at around the 4TeV range).
The point is the Earth has already been struck many times by particles of a very broad range of energies, including the range of energies used by particle physicists. If anything bad was going to happen due to a collision between particles of a specific energy, it should have already happened long ago when a cosmic ray of that energy struck the Earth.
On the other hand we have the Fermi Paradox – the mystery of the missing aliens. One possible explanation for why our universe seems so empty of intelligent alien life is that (almost?) all technological civilisations make a common mistake – they reach a level of technology which enables them to commit an act which results in their own destruction. One possible candidate for that act of self destruction is a high energy particle physics experiment which goes horribly wrong.
I haven’t read Professor Rees’ book, so for all I know he has an explanation for the cosmic ray flaw in the “particle experiment will destroy the world” theory. But for now I’m not going to be losing any sleep over this alleged risk.
Update (EW) Added the paragraph “The point is the Earth has already been struck many times…” to clarify the Cosmic Ray objection to the alleged risk of particle physics experiments.
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I’m afraid the Telegraph has misread Prof Reese. I’m sure the author wrote those things tongue-in-cheek and isn’t really serious. However, the idea of space-time misbehaving is far from new. I remember Asimov wrote a story in the 60ies about a group of people trapped in an ever shrinking space-time bubble. I think it was called ‘the Psi Effect’ or something like that. The story ended when everyone was plunged in the dark because the bubble had shrunk so small that lightwaves couldn’t fit in it. The last resort of the poor sods was prayer.
Oh, what’s that slurping sound coming out of the kitchen? Is it an ever growing black hole? No, it’s the dog.
“60ies”
Sixty – ies?
Come on guys we all know how this will pan out. The Earth shrinks to a 100 yard diameter ball but the Germans will get their beach towels down on all the best sunbathing spots before anyone else has a chance …
Get a Butler suite at Sandals Ochi and have your own pool and lounges.
The Telegraph reports how Rees also claims “a black hole could form and then suck in everything around it.”
Black hole?
Black holes, dark mass and dark energy are abstract mathematical concepts, they are not necessarily out there (do I hear ‘booo!’ ?)
Two days ago a CERN physicist was dismissed from his job not being politically correct !
Black holes, dark mass and dark energy have introduced racist terminology into science of astrophysics, and should be banned forthwith!
ergo: they do not exist (/sarc)
You only need read the headline to guess that the guy is selling something.
Yup. Its a book.
+1 Brownie Point for me.
(Psssst, where’s the nearest bin?)
Professor:
Take a coin, about the size of a 50 pence piece, and hold it up flat at arms length against *any* part of the sky.
If you could hold it for 12 months, there would have been approximately one million supernova explosions gone off behind it.
Your particle accelerator is something slightly less than zero compared to any one of those.
Thus begging The Question:
Are we really here to say as much?
Its fair to say though, that some of us are ‘less here’ than others.
Peta trying not to look at males with waists greater than 37 inches and folks who ‘do’ any sort of recreational drug, who are excused from, and incapable of, coherently answering.
Absolutely they do.
The Technology in question is ‘Settlements’
Settlements require the use of ploughs, combined with nitrogenous fertiliser and optionally, genetic modification of (living) organisms. Plants esp.
Thank you John Deere.
Thank you Bosch Haber.
Thank you Monsanto
Thanks for nothing
Please do try and disregard what you’ve seen on TV and in cinemas.
Where Star Trek etc went wrong is that they never demonstrated any technology that reverses soil erosion.
Like the invaders from Mars in War of the Worlds – its the simple & small things which, when overlooked, prove to be the real killers.
Hence why Fermi equation is junk – it makes (at least) one fatally flawed assumption.
It doesn’t take any account of ‘Hubris’
Not dissimilar to Black Hole Theory and of course, the theory of the GHGE
One may argue that the Fermi idea is an embodiment of hubris in itself.
Pride before a fall…………………..
It gets worse.
We all know about Charles Darwin. Wrote a fairly famous book. Been controversial ever since but nothing compared to the controversy at the time. Everyone knew about evolution, only Darwin was brave enough to put the thinking into a book.
Obviously not a big fan of carbohydrate foods nor a drinker/smoker
Darwin had access to A Field – a sizable patch of green grass sometimes used for the grazing of horses.
At some point, said field was ploughed and reseeded. Darwin mentally noted how the horse’s shoes subsequently clattered on the stones that had been brought to the surface.
Anyway, off he went to research and fact-check his Big Book and as is the way of things it took longer than planned. He was away from The Field for about 30 years.
On his return, he noted that the stones had all disappeared.
Obvious question, where were they?
Nobody claimed responsibility for doing any ‘stone picking’ so he did (modern day scientists take note) his own research using a spade.
He dug a few holes in the field and lo-and-behold, Ye Shocke Horreur, there were all the stones he remembered.
Under several inches of soil.
So. How did they get there?
Darwin, as we’ve established not being a sugar eater or drinker, quickly worked out what had happened.
He did not require ‘more research’ and set about writing a new book. A book that he himself considered far more scientifically important than the ‘other book’
It was going to be all about soil – and the critters dwelling within the top 2 or 3 feet depth of it.
He’d worked out what soil is and how it is created and, by implication, what destroys it.
Sadly, he passed away before getting very far.
Whooda thunk, but the spirit of Darwin is alive and well in the shape of the guy looking after some (3 large and 2 small) ponies in the field at the end of my garden.
He doesn’t realise quite what, but has noticed something.
That stones are coming up and out of the ground in his pony field.
Stones are spontaneously appearing in his field.
(Recall what even The Bible says about ‘stony ground’)
He has noticed soil erosion, just from the grazing of horses – even and totally without ploughing or artificial fertiliser.
Admittedly he is keeping twice as much horse flesh on his field than he really should though (5 ponies on 3 acres when the usual suggestion would be 2 horses on that 3 acres)
But that is effectively what modern agriculture is doing, generating ever more ‘food’ from a fixed area of ground.
There are No Free Lunches out there. None.
Wonder if Kirk, Picard or Janeway ever noticed anything like that
We don’t till soil around here until rains have packed it down so badly that drilled seeds don’t germinate well and water runs off too rapidly. I lose more soil in my fields from wind erosion than water. It really helps to leave the stubble in place to rot, from the standpoints of erosion and soil amendment. I don’t seem to be destroying my soil by farming it, my yields are growing.
On the other hand, my herd of 3 quarter horses and 2 donkeys reside in a half-acre dry lot when they are not out to pasture. Wind and water erosion are very evident there. The best fix for that is waste lime from a nearby quarry, which also maintains healthy hooves.
It does get worse, you post twice in a row.
Indeed – ‘what we don’t know we don’t know’.
See – “The Subways of Tazoo” (New Writings in SF 3)” – proper link in the wiki-thing [Yes, I can edit it!] – entry for ‘Unorthodox Engineers’.
I enjoyed the first three stories hugely.
Auto
Sucked up by a black hole, doesn’t sound to bad to me.
Iv’e had worse days.
lol +1
When the hole’s black, you’ll never come back. 😎
In fiction, David Brin’s ‘Earth’ begins with a mob causing an experimental black hole to be released into the Earth’s interior. And it goes on from there. A fun read, if you allow for his “Ice caps melting plus excess U/V” scenario. As an aside, I find myself wondering just WHY so many ‘hard’ Science Fiction writers seem to have bought into the CAGW myth?
+kudos for Brin’s novel, Earth [1990]! A great read, especially the eerie ‘death spirals’ and the poor space traveling scuba diver. And the zany news and classified items of Brin’s fully envisioned ‘Internet’. There are many things in the book that will delight and haunt you.
See here! We created a persistent black hole confined in a magnetic cage.
I suppose you have supercapacitor banks charged by running dynamos to keep the field stable?
Naw…. we just plugged it into the wall outlet. Don’t trip over the cord!
Look, here comes the mob! If this thing gets loose, it will be their fault!
From what I have learned of the human race, completely plausible.
A movie was made about this I think it was german scientists at CERN or somewhere in Germany. The world was saved at the last time but a lot of stuff was sucked up first! haha
I am a happy student of Stanford U’s Professor Leonardo Susskind’s on-line lectures. Within the week I watched him argue persuasively that BH evaporate.
that BH evaporate
The smaller they are, the faster they go “poof”.
The bigger they are, the slower you go “POOOOOOOOOooooooooooo…………”
[…]
The late Steven Hawking wrote in 2014 that there are no black holes, this from the top quantum relativity mentor himself, a master of the maths.
Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting for Black Holes
https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.5761
This serious paper is well worth reading, relatively accessible. The euphemism is a bombshell – looks like he pulled the carpet right out from under them. So not only do they evaporate, but actually do not form either.
Einstein was asked about Schwarzschild’s solution, and dismissed it as unphysical as time would stop before collapse allowing no change – not possible physically. He proposed the collapse energy density would be converted to space. No wonder he was looking for a unified theory.
Rees speaks as if he has “the” theory – o.k.. where is quantum gravity?
Rees is attempting to sell fear of the unknown.
“We don’t know”, so it must be horrible.
Sheer absurdity.
This comes across as a plot from a comic book.
Black holes and similar constructs are a function of mass, not name or description.
That the universe will end up inside a black hole is a possibility, given enough time.
A time factor that closely resembles forever.
Nor is it irrational to assume Earth has encountered every possible particle, during it’s several billion years of existence, without suffering the extents of Rees’ imagination.
From phys.org
Just like a carnival barker:
Come one. Come all!
Fear the unknown!
Man will destroy man, it is foretold!
“We don’t know”, but man must destroy man.
The good Lord is distracting from the train-wreck called quantum mechanics.
Watch ‘El Barco’. – very bad science movie about the ‘particle accelerator’ creating a black hole and destroying all the land masses in the world… but not the oceans.
Every episode is one ridiculous science disaster after another !
Hillarious
So bad it’s El Barfo?
Quarks are fermions. Bound by the strong nuclear force, they compose protons and neutrons. Along with electrons and some composites, they constitute all the ordinary matter in the universe; some 5% of the universe according to our best understanding.
The universe is a dangerous place, abounding with mysterious matters and energies. With the many degrees of freedom cosmology affords, one can construe dangerous points many ways. When it eventually comes clear to the unwashed that CO2 does not warrant the current fear and loathing, what better place to project the fret than the cosmos?
“When it eventually comes clear to the unwashed that CO2 does not warrant the current fear and loathing, what better place to project the fret than the cosmos?”
OK so you go and get ‘The Universe’ to pay the blackhole tax!
Every second countless particles with energies far in excess of anything that the LHC can produce, far in excess of anything that humans can ever produce, hit the upper layers of the Earth’s atmosphere and… nothing happens! This simple empirical observation disproves any concerns over machines such as LHC, ITER, &c. I am surprised Prof. Lord Martin Rees peddles such nonsense.
Scientists discover pipe with U-trap at center of galaxy. Spiral shape now understood. Urgent hunt for plug underway.
Book sales rack up while the truth is just getting its pants on.
What does it matter? If a black hole was created we would all disappear so fast there’s no running away,
There’ll be no one to save with the world in a grave.
“>>> If a black hole was created we would all disappear so fast there’s no running away… <<<"
Not really. A particle-size black hole, produced by particle collisions, if this is at all possible, would in fact evaporate instantaneously due to Hawking radiation.
And you know this because…….
In any event perhaps you didn’t recognize the words:
“there’s no running away, there’ll be no one to save with the world in a grave,
take a look around you boy, it’s bound to scare you boy,
And you tell me, over and over and over again my friend…”
It would take an infinite amount of time to fall into a black hole.
Note, in Newtonian gravity, r=0 (in spherical coordinates is a physical singularity – the physics breaks down – but it’s an artifact of the coordinate system.
Space-time is a configuration space.
It’s just a mapping from the physical space and time to space-time which adheres to the Laws of Thermodynamics and avoids faster then light signals.
Black holes and strangelets are cosmological and mathematical mind farts.
In physics, if it can’t be observed it doesn’t exist.
Well, you leave out one important detail there.
When the cosmic rays are colliding with particles in the Earth, they are hitting particles at rest. However, in the Hadron collider two particles close to the speed of light, but from opposite directions, are colliding head on.
Because of relativistic effects that makes an enormous difference. A particle close to lightspeed is much heavier than a particle at rest.
I addition the volume of the particle in motion is also much smaller, resulting in a smaller and denser collision space.
https://www.britannica.com/science/relativistic-mass
/Jan
“>>> However, in the Hadron collider two particles close to the speed of light, but from opposite directions, are colliding head on. <<<"
Yes, it's true. But the energies produced by cosmic accelerators are so much higher than anything we can ever produce on Earth that it doesn't make much difference.
Do you bother to calculate that?
Cosmic rays are predominantly protons. A 3×10^20 eV proton hitting a proton at rest is equally energetic as a collision of two 5.5×10^14 eV protons. That is still a lot more than the 14 TeV (=14×10^12eV) of the LHC. Conversion factor to rest frame: square root (proton energy/ rest mass proton(= ~1GeV)).
Are you sure?
I have made some rough starting point estimations below
A proton in rest has a mass of 1.67 *10exp-27 kg. A proton accelerated to 4 TeV has a mass of 7.1*10exp-24Kg, i.e. more than four thousand times heavier.
The “Oh-my God” particle had an energy of 3*10 exp 8 MeV, or about 75 million times more than the fastest particle accelerated by humans.
If we use the analogy that a proton in rest can be compared to a pea with a mass of one gram, the fastest particle accelerated by humans would weigh 4 kg, and the “Oh my God” particle would weigh 300 000 ton.
The collisions to compare are therefore two 4 kg particles colliding head on, compared to one 300 000-ton particle at a much higher speed colliding with a one gram particle.
But it is more to it than that.
When these “particles” collide, they move straight through each other like dots of smoke. However, there is friction when they pass through each other and the interesting part is the small space left behind where the collision has occurred. The aim is to maximize the energy density per unit of volume.
This means that the size of the volume where the particles passes through each other matters a lot. This volume is much smaller when two particles collide head on, than if one is in rest.
The proton in rest has a spherical volume, but the particles near lightspeed have a relativistic length contraction which give them a shape more like razor thin pancakes.
A proton accelerated to 4TeV will have a speed of 0.99999997, and a length contraction ratio of 0.00023. That means that if, as an analogy, a particle in rest is 1 a sphere with one meter in diameter, the 4 TeV particle would be a 0.2-millimeter-thick disk. The diameter orthogonal to the speed would still be one meter, but the volume of the object is much smaller.
Taking all this into consideration the difference between the collisions with the most energetic cosmic particles and a particle in rest, and the human crated collisions is closing in. I leave the exact calculation to the domain experts.
/Jan
CERN’s LEP (e+, e-) upgraded to the LHC (p+) for various reasons (synchrotron radiation, cross sections …). Protons do not collide, rather their quarks do.
Still, not being billiard balls, the only thing that matters is the energy density.
There are cosmic protons arriving here with relativistic mass of a baseball, but a nuclear cross section from some supernovas (Crab?) or the galactic bow-shock. It gets much hotter in spiral arms or as our system bobs more into that bow shock plasma. Enough to cause mass extinctions, snowball earth, a real hazard, not something from Lord Rees’maths imagination.
I have not read the book, but it is possible that these catastrophic scenaria, which were put forward when first the LHC was designed, are the cosmologist’s fear that the source of money for experimenting in cosmology is the same source as for the money required for future colliders, and there is not enough for both. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_of_high-energy_particle_collision_experiments
But what if we accelerate some type of particle not normally very energetic in nature? We would then be outside the range of natural phenomenon and maybe new behaviors would be encountered, such as: BOOM!
God decided He was finally fed up with the human race and decided to end it for good. He called up a reporter at the New York Times to tell him the news: The world would end the day after tomorrow.
The reporter tried to talk God out of it, but God was firm and wouldn’t be swayed. The reporter then asked if he had an exclusive. God said that He was going to call three other newspapers.
Headlines the next day:
The New York Times: “God says world to end tomorrow; story and analysis on page B11.”
The Wall Street Journal: “God says world to end tomorrow; market to close early”
USA Today: “IT’S OVER!”
The Washington Post: “God says world to end tomorrow; women and minorities hardest hit.”
Seems unlikely seeing that recently two neutrinos with energy 0.6 EeV were spotted in Antarctica having passed through the Earth and out the other side. That is 600,000 TeV. The LHC can do about 13 TeV.
Hints of weird particles from space may defy physicists’ standard model (28 Sep)
To detect those two particles the detector had to see the results of the neutrinos colliding with water molecules in the ice cap. E = MV^2 means that when the collision occurs the energy can be converted to mass and vice versa, so at ~50,000 times more energetic than the LHC you’d expect an equivalent increase in probability of the Earth going down a spacetime plughole.
Likewise since such high energy events are happening even more often to the Sun, being bigger than the Earth, you have to wonder why the poor beastie has survived these last 4.5 billion years.
Martin Rees has long had form as a climate catastropharian too.
It already happened…As we all approach the event horizon of this new super-dense world, time slows down. Since time is relative, we all experience everything as normal even though the world is collapsing into this man-made black hole. Since time will continue to slow down towards zero, we will never actually experience the last moment (passing into the event horizon) and we, as a species, live forever…
The only testable part of this theory is that most people’s brains stop functioning rationally, and these people start believing in anything non-rational told to them enough times with enough conviction.
So…those of us still sane will live continuously among the insane with no hope of ever convincing them of anything rational. Yup…we created Hades.
Maybe I’ll go write a book.
Nice idea, that. I’ll let you all know when it has happened.
This has “retirement plan” written all over it much like James Hansen’s and Ravi Batra’s, and Matt Simmons’.
could see our planet reduced to 330 feet across.
It will mean popping down to the pub for a beer a lot easier.