From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Thu May 23 2002 - 14:05:15 MDT
Spudboy forwards from:
> http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992312
> All around us are tiny doors that lead to the rest of the
> Universe. Predicted by Einstein's equations, these quantum wormholes
> offer a faster-than-light short cut to the rest of the cosmos...
I don't see anything new here - it's been hypothesized for years that
negative energy would be necessary to stabilize wormholes. See Robert
Forward's sci-fi novel Timemaster for some imaginative uses.
But this last part really bugs me:
> The CERN Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland is expected to generate
> one mini-black hole per second, a potential source of wormholes through
> which physicists could try to send quantum-sized particles.
It's amazing to see how an *extremely* speculative prediction has now
migrated to conventional wisdom. Another article claiming the same thing
is http://www.nature.com/nsu/011004/011004-8.html:
: Physicists at may soon be manufacturing copious quantities of black
: holes. When the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European particle
: physics laboratory near Geneva, is completed in 2005, it could produce
: a black hole every second.
It's only when we follow the link at the bottom of that article to
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/hep-ph/0106219 that we see:
: If the fundamental Planck scale is of order a TeV, as the case in some
: extra-dimensions scenarios, future hadron colliders such as the Large
: Hadron Collider will be black hole factories.
See? It's only true in theories of extra dimensions, where the
universe has something like 10 spatial dimension. These theories are
extremely speculative to say the least. The LHC will be a good test of
the existence of these extra dimensions but I doubt that many people
seriously expect the theory to be confirmed. The conventional Planck
scale is 10^19 GeV, and these guys are assuming it is about 10^3 GeV.
Their prediction is 16 orders of magnitude different from conventional
physics! It can't be ruled out but it is far from the mainstream.
So we have gone from a test of extra-dimensional physics at the LHC to
the fact that the LHC is "expected" to generate black holes. Somebody
is being awfully sloppy.
Hal
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