Sunday, September 20, 2009

Revisiting micro black holes from the LHC

On the potential catastrophic risk from metastable quantum-black holes produced at particle colliders

I have been meaning to link to this for some time, but keep forgetting.

In August, physicist Rainer Plaga put out a revised version of his paper (see above) in which he raised a possible scenario via which the LHC could create a dangerous mini black hole. Basically, it's the original paper with another couple of appendices to it, responding to criticism by the physicists who had done the earlier papers giving reasons why the LHC could not do that.

It is hard for me as a lay person to read papers at this level and understand their maths and arguments. However, again I have the impression that Plaga is arguing in a reasonable fashion, and appears to be making points which are not receiving much attention.

He is apparently no longer working in astrophysics, and his attitude to criticism, and past changes of opinion, have been noted here.

However, the tone of Plaga's paper and response to its criticisms does not sound unreasonable to this lay reader. I just wish there was someone who could go through all three or four papers relevant to the issue, and tell me if my feeling is accurate.

Given the technical problems with getting the LHC running, my concern about this have been somewhat diminished lately. But I would still like to know the answer, as they are likely to get the thing working correctly some time or other.

1 comment:

Polymath said...

You write "Given the technical problems with getting the LHC running, my concern about this have been somewhat diminished lately."

But the technical problems should INCREASE your concern. If the theory that LHC will destroy us is correct, then only in worlds which experience technical problems will bloggers still be around to discuss the issue, and only until the technical problems are fixed. Furthermore, if we see a whole string of apparently unrelated glitches stopping the LHC from reaching full power, anthropic reasoning says ever more strongly "STOP RIGHT NOW!!".