[0710.3395] If LHC is a Mini-Time-Machines Factory, Can We Notice?
Readers may recall that the Large Hadron Collider (due to start up next year) might, or might not, create large numbers of mini black holes, which might or might not decay completely, perhaps leaving remnants the exact nature of which seem not entirely understood. It might also create strangelets and other exotic things, like Saturn shaped black hole rings, about which the good people at CERN keep saying "don't you worry about that, citizens of Earth."
This is a new one, it seems: there have been a couple of papers recently saying that it might also create twisted bits of space- time which will effectively be tiny time machines.
I haven't read the paper above carefully yet, but its general gist seems to be that such time machines may be hard to detect as they are also expected to evaporate, but maybe they will cause some effect which will be detectable. (Hopefully, expanding to swallow the earth and sending it back to the big bang will not be one of them.)
All very interesting, if you are interested in this sort of thing.
By the way, I have been told via private email from someone who knows a bit more about this that CERN has agreed to do some more safety review stuff. Can't say that I have seen this confirmed anywhere on the Web, though.
1 comment:
Hi Steve
Thanks for your lucid continued monitoring of this issue.
Re the confirmation on the web - if you go to
http://public.web.cern.ch/Public/Content/Chapters/AboutCERN/CERNFuture/LHCSafe/LHCSafe-en.html
You will see that it is a page entitled:
Are LHC collisions safe?
The relevant sentence on the page is:
"CERN has mandated a group of particle physicists, also not involved in the LHC experiments, to monitor the latest speculations about LHC collisions; this group may be contacted at lsag@cern.ch."
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