Black hole danger not gone??!!

0808.1415v1.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Bloody hell - I was curious as to why there had been another sudden burst of publicity against there being any danger from micro black holes potentially being created at the Large Hadron Collider.

Here's my guess: it's to counter this paper (linked above) called "On the potential catastrophic risk from metastable quantum-black holes produced at particle colliders" which it appeared at Arxiv on 10 August.

The author - R Plaga - is a mainstream, well published, astrophysicist, as far as I can tell.

Here's the Wikipedia entry on this recent controversy, which I had missed until today. Giddings and Mangano, who gave the LHC the "all clear" earlier this year, have responded to Plaga's paper.

I have no time to read up on this right now, but sheesh, I wish this was all sorted with more time before they flick the switch on the LHC.

It is also further vindication of my long held position that physicists at CERN had never previously done a really thorough consideration of all the possible dangers from the operation of the LHC.

UPDATE: this is really hard for a non-scientist to follow, but it would seem that Mangano point to what is almost a mathematical mistake in Plaga's paper. Not at all sure that I have understood the point, though, and I would like to know if Plaga acknowledges a mistake.

His argument is that, if certain models are right (which of itself is probably a very big "if,") micro black holes could represent a planetary danger even if stars clearly have survived naturally created ones over the millennia.

You know, one of the underlying concerns that worriers have had about the LHC is whether danger from such experiments is a plausible explanation for the Fermi Paradox. That's why I still do not feel relaxed and comfortable, when safety issues are still being proposed by credible figures just a month before the machine is switched on.