A black hole on your coffee table
My Sunday morning tradition is to read the Helsingin Sanomat newspaper, all of it. It takes usually from 3 to 4 hours, but I consider it time well spent. This morning there was a truly fascinating article about the LHC particle accelerator in Cern, the European organization for nuclear research. The article is titled "Doomsday is coming".
The story is that next Wednesday Cern will switch on their LHC particle accelerator in order to study the essence of universe. The particle accelerator is a 27 km long, round tube. Once turned on, particles including protons will run into each other with a tremendous force, possibly creating small black holes. Now, a black hole is a "region of space in which the gravitational field is so powerful that nothing, not even electromagnetic radiation (e.g. visible light), can escape its pull after having fallen past its event horizon." (source: wikipedia)
In other words, next Wednesday the world might see a birth of a black hole that can potentially suck the entire world in it, in a blink of an eye. Or so it is feared.
Luckily the scientists are quite unianimous in their reasoning that small black holes like this will disappear before they get big enough to do any serious damage. The finnish professor Esko Valtaoja interviewed in the article says that he could have a black hole on his coffee table and it would not be dangerous if he did not go near it. "after all, you don't fall into a well either unless you go close enough".
This opens a whole (or should I say hole) new possibilites for science: create and sell small black holes for people to have on their coffee tables. I would certainly buy one.
The story is that next Wednesday Cern will switch on their LHC particle accelerator in order to study the essence of universe. The particle accelerator is a 27 km long, round tube. Once turned on, particles including protons will run into each other with a tremendous force, possibly creating small black holes. Now, a black hole is a "region of space in which the gravitational field is so powerful that nothing, not even electromagnetic radiation (e.g. visible light), can escape its pull after having fallen past its event horizon." (source: wikipedia)
In other words, next Wednesday the world might see a birth of a black hole that can potentially suck the entire world in it, in a blink of an eye. Or so it is feared.
Luckily the scientists are quite unianimous in their reasoning that small black holes like this will disappear before they get big enough to do any serious damage. The finnish professor Esko Valtaoja interviewed in the article says that he could have a black hole on his coffee table and it would not be dangerous if he did not go near it. "after all, you don't fall into a well either unless you go close enough".
This opens a whole (or should I say hole) new possibilites for science: create and sell small black holes for people to have on their coffee tables. I would certainly buy one.
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