The LHC

The LHC stands for Large Hadron Collider. There has been speculation that this collider will be so powerful that it will create black holes and that these black holes will consume the earth and we will all die.


The plp who are worried that this will end the world don’t understand the physics of what will happen.
Yes it is possible for an atom to gain enough mass through velocity so that the radius of the event horizon grows beyond the surface of the proton and create a Black hole.

And yes maybe...maybe...the proton will then collapse so that it will remain a black hole even at rest. But this is not of concern because if this worse case happens there will be at least 3 thing keeping us from dieing.

1) The event horizon will be smaller then the size of a proton making it basely harmless to any thing that exist. There is so much space between atoms that it would be a statical anomaly for anything to come in to contact with it. And sense it has the same mass as a proton it will have the same gravitational attraction. Almost all atoms will pass it by unaffected

2) its traveling near the speed of light. if something goes wrong and we make a black hole and it escapes the collider then we will have fired a microscopic black hole away from the earth at near the speed of light, in 10 mins it will be further then the sun, and by the end of the day it will have left the sole system. Thus earth will be saved from the harmless black hole.

3) Small black holes are short lived according to the Hawkings theory of decay. A black hole with the mass of a large building would only last 1 second. So were talking like 1/1000000000th the mass of that.