Black Holes and White Rabbits

[garymcgrory]

Just back from Glasgow university tonight having been to a highly entertaining and informative lecture on black holes coupled with some very nifty Tommy Cooper inspired magic.

Prof. John Brown presided over a brief overview on Black Holes and how the science behind Black Holes can seem a bit like magic (not a lot)!However as I had to make a quick exit at the end I missed the Q&A's. I did not get the chance to ask a question that has been bugging me for a while now. Wondered if you could help me out?

Here goes....

Since no one really knows how Black Holes grow/contract, but everyone is agreed that they have the most devastating effect on matter close by and also given the general consensis from scientists that they will be able to make Black Holes in the new large Hadron collider, what makes them all so convinced that these tiny Black Holes will dissapear?

Why wont they stick around and grow? With the rather obvious inconvenient consequences.

You will have to forgive my skepticism on the part of scientific assurances, "that these Black Holes will be harmless and dissapear", I have been reading the works of John Gray of late and his deconstruction of the scientific "faith" have cast me into a pit of doubt , that and the fact that the football season as ended in Scotland and with no imminent signings for Celtic i have to worry/think about something equally important.

answers on a postcard.....

[GazOC]

I know what you mean, as soon as the football season ends my mind starts wandering...

[Jamie]

But Gary doesn't watch football he watches Celtic.... :)

[Cloudwatcher]

We're all doomed I tell ye! Doomed to the black hole of despair! Well till next season anyway!

[Jamie]

All kidding aside.

The bit i can't get my head around is -

We all know that black holes regardless of size are so powerfull that they suck everything in that vicinity into it yeh?

So if the so called "scientists" just make them dissapear where dose all the matter go that was sucked in....

When Prof John Brown came to our society for a talk on this subject

i am sure he said that it didn't really matter about the size of a black hole as the destructive power was so immense it is yet to be measured...

[Jamie]

We're all doomed I tell ye! Doomed to the black hole of despair! Well till next season anyway!

My team has been doomed for a few years now.

Oh well i can only wish....

[Whippy]

But Gary doesn't watch football he watches Celtic scottish football.... :)

Fixed. .

[garymcgrory]

But Gary doesn't watch football he watches Celtic Scottish football.... :)

Fixed. .

seem to remember a wee Scottish team beating the current premier league champions with a sublime free kick, champions league game I think

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHjV3YqSqeU

:whip2:

But back to the imminent end of the world, when will this new particle accelerator be up and running? is it worth me booking up the holidays for next year?

[Whippy]

That goal almost made my season, I have a near irrational hatred of the Man U red sox... The mighty Spurs putting Chelski in their place was the one for me .

Anyhoo... I'd book your holdays because if we all get sucked into something/somewhere else, it's not like your travel agent is going to be able to use the money is it? I'd like a small Black Hole and keep it in a box. If anyone is getting on my nerves, I'd just open the box... byeee!! Pandora? Hah.

Roll on August (if we're still here)......COYS!!!!!!!

[Cloudwatcher]

But back to the imminent end of the world, when will this new particle accelerator be up and running? is it worth me booking up the holidays for next year?

Depends on where you want to go. Another dimension perhaps!! Look on the bright side....No excess baggage fees!

[garymcgrory]

love the idea of a black hole in a box but what would the box be made of to stop it falling in?

Love the idea of falling into another dimension but I reckon given my luck i would still be a mortgage adviser on the other side only this time because of the differing constants working in this parallel universe I'm sure my normal working hours will have stretched to 40000000000000000000000hrs per week!!

[barkis]

The immense and unfathomable gravitational forces that are involved in black hole creations, can never be produced by mans puny efforts. They might simulate the process in a minute way, but anything created will be unsustainable.

That is my thought on the matter, and having said it, I also need to say my knowledge of Physics is Quark sized, so you can POOH POOH at will. I saw Professor Brown in Newton Stewart some years ago. He was there as guest speaker, celebrating the forming of the local astronomical society. He was doing the Black Holes and White Rabbits bit way back then. Whilst his lecture was probably very good, I was only pretending to understand it all. It rained all the time we were there too, so we spent most of the time in the bookshops,of which there are hundreds. I think it is called the Book Town.

Ron.

[Cloudwatcher]

Relax guys, I'm sure you are in good hands. After all wasn't Edward Teller who said "Trust me I'm a scientist"!

CW

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[jonifive]

Ron Said:

The immense and unfathomable gravitational forces that are involved in black hole creations, can never be produced by mans puny efforts. They might simulate the process in a minute way, but anything created will be unsustainable.

100 percent agree Ron.....although you do sound a bit like Stan Lee

[The Warthog]

All kidding aside.

The bit i can't get my head around is -

We all know that black holes regardless of size are so powerfull that they suck everything in that vicinity into it yeh?

So if the so called "scientists" just make them dissapear where dose all the matter go that was sucked in....

When Prof John Brown came to our society for a talk on this subject

i am sure he said that it didn't really matter about the size of a black hole as the destructive power was so immense it is yet to be measured...

Not exactly. Black holes are strong gravitational sources, with a gravity proportionat to the amount of mass that has gone into the black hole. Anything that falls into the gravity well of a black hole will disappear behind the event horizon, but it is possible to orbit a black hole, just as it is possible to orbit any other object that has gravity. It can't reach out and grab you.

The black hole itself is a singularity, with no dimensions, but the event horizon's distance from the black hole depends on the mass of that singularity.

According to Hawking, small black holes can evaporate. I don't understand that bit. Also, black holes aren't actually black, as they glow with the radiation from the event horizon caused by stuff not falling in, and escaping the clutches of the BH. I don't understand that bit either, but that's not too bad for a psychology graduate, eh?

GO CELTIC!!

[garymcgrory]

As far as I'm concerned the really fascinating and amazing aspect of black hole science is, that up until now, all our knowledge/theory's have had to be deducted/postulated by indirect means.

We cannot see the black hole itself but as WH quite rightly points out, we can see the accretion disk and image the ejected streams of matter that doesn't get sucked into the BH.

Even though we cannot see a BH's boundary of singularity (not sure that is the correct term), we have seen the orbits of stars very close to a BH and from this evidence we are able to calculate the mass of the BH and therefore the distance to the event horizon.

We have also seen the effect a BH has on space time as seen in images showing the gravitational lens effect- Einsteins' cross.

However referring to my original post the scary thing for me is that we may soon be bringing a BH to our rather innocuous part of the Galaxy and these amazing objects/phenomenon could be studied directly- for the first time.

If we do do this and BH's don't do what i thought they might do, do you think we may get closer to the single theory model that physicists are dreaming of?

I am really hopeful that when these particle accelerators start providing data we will get to the bare bones of what matter is and how it organises itself- if all we get are more exotically named particles or indeed if we get nothing much more than we know already, i think we should all be asking for a rebate on our taxes, given the massive cost of these projects to set up!

After all of the above waffle here is my question-

Does anyone think that we will take a great leap forward towards a unified theory when the NLHC comes on line? :scratch:

P.S. come on the Maple Leafs

[garymcgrory]

BTW Ron meant to say in last post that i bet Prof J Brown's Paul Daniel act hasn't changed a bit- would love to see magic coupled with other scientific teaching.

Imagine if Doctors taught young medical students with the aid of a large saw, box, glamorous assistant and 12 white doves. I would consider a go at medicine if i thought David Blaine was teaching first year!

[barkis]

Ron Said:

The immense and unfathomable gravitational forces that are involved in black hole creations, can never be produced by mans puny efforts. They might simulate the process in a minute way, but anything created will be unsustainable.

100 percent agree Ron.....although you do sound a bit like Stan Lee

Stan Lee? He is something to do with Spider Man is he not?

[The Warthog]

The singularity is dimensionless, no matter how much mass it contains. The Black Holes that would be formed in accelerators are expected to evaporate almost as soon as they appear (phew!) but should produce some interesting film.

The Maple Leafs are all out on the golf course, and after tonight, the Senators will be, too, and Lord Stanley's cup will be in the possession of a team called the "Mighty Ducks."

[Whippy]

Gary, IMO there's not such thing as a single unified theory. Everything's just too complicated and scientists are looking for a 'lazy fix' that'll cover everything. From my basic understanding of String Theory, there's even less of a chance.

Ron, Stan Lee used to own Marvel comics (he may still do, but I wager hyperglobalmegacorp bought it), home of Spiderman, X-Men, Fantastic 4, Silver Surfer, The Hulk and loads of other charecters.

Tony..

[barkis]

BTW Ron meant to say in last post that i bet Prof J Brown's Paul Daniel act hasn't changed a bit- would love to see magic coupled with other scientific teaching.

Imagine if Doctors taught young medical students with the aid of a large saw, box, glamorous assistant and 12 white doves. I would consider a go at medicine if i thought David Blaine was teaching first year!

:nono: :nono: I explained myself rather poorly there. I was not casting aspersions on Prof. Brown or his methods, he's Scotlands Astronomer Royal for goodness sake, I would not have the temerity. No, I was at the back of the hall, and I couldn't hear a damn thing he was saying. Honest.

[themos]

Black hole evaporation: Here's my understanding of it.

It does not depend on material falling in from outside. It relies on the picture of the quantum mechanical vacuum, that physical state where it is not possible to remove anything from. This vacuum state can be visualized by a continuous irreducible "boiling" of all kinds of fields (matter and force). This is one of the most basic features of quantum mechanics: an oscillator cannot be in a state of zero motion, there's always some kind of writhing going on.

The "boiling" of the fields is usually visualized by the spontaneous creation of a particle/antiparticle pair corresponding to the field and their subsequent destruction by mutual annihilation.

In the presence of an event horizon, one of the pair has a finite probability of crossing it during its brief flight. Recombination is then impossible and the other member of the pair must survive and become "physical", that is, observable. This is the quantum radiation emitted by a black hole, or, more correctly, by the event horizon of the black hole. The smaller the event horizon, the more pronounced the effect, so black holes evaporate in an accelerated way, leading to a rapid explosion towards the end.

Here endeth the lesson. All this is just my probably faulty understanding, so beware.

[SteveL]

The smaller the event horizon, the more pronounced the effect, so black holes evaporate in an accelerated way, leading to a rapid explosion towards the end.

Well, that has made me feel a lot better... instead of getting swallowed into a mini-blackhole's event horizon, we are likely to be caught in the explosion of high energy particles and matter instead. I`ll sleep a lot better tonight

[themos]

Well, that has made me feel a lot better... instead of getting swallowed into a mini-blackhole's event horizon, we are likely to be caught in the explosion of high energy particles and matter instead. I`ll sleep a lot better tonight

Yes but remember that any black holes produced by the collider will have tiny masses and will only be able to emit as much energy as was put into them in the first place. So we'll probably end up with particles as energetic as the ones that were in the beam anyway.

[SteveL]

Maybe I missed inserting the <bold><sarcasm> tags in my post