More on the CERN Black Hole Issue: We Get Answers

Following my original post on Europe’s CERN particle-physics lab’s safety review of the massive, Large Hadron Collider in France and Switzerland, we received quite a bit of feedback by comments and e-mail. Some of the more compelling information provided is to be found at the LHC Facts web site. Rather than copying a lot of information here, I’ll leave it to you to click through and check it out, but it is disturbing to note the number of influential astrophysicists who do not feel that the CERN safety evaluation has answered all the questions and are still quite alarmed that this facility’s operations could result in a frankly unimaginable disaster.

In what seems like an incredible coincidence of good fortune, we were already scheduled to conduct an interview this Tuesday, June 24, on Mid Stream Radio with Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson. If you ever watch The Discovery Channel, Learning Channel, History Channel or Science channel, you are already familiar with Dr. Tyson. He is interviewed for virtually every show on the cosmos and black holes. He is the author of the book, Death by Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries among many other titles, with a new book coming out this winter. He is the Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History and is a Visiting Research Scientist and Lecturer at Princeton University. He holds advanced degrees from Harvard and Columbia and is undoubtedly one of the smartest people on the planet regarding this subject. If anyone can give us authoritative answers on this question, it’s Dr. Tyson.

In addition to talking about his new book and television science series, we were going to speak with Dr. Tyson about a lighter subject, (the “publish or perish” mentality in academia) but given the serious nature of this story, I think we will redirect our interview to discuss the implications of the Large Hadron Collider’s experiments. The interview will be at 1 PM eastern time on Tuesday, so if you have your own questions you can call in to the show or join us in the web chat to pose your queries there. (We’ll post a reminder on Tuesday morning with the details.)

In the original column, reader Kathyedits posed the following question:

Okay, no one here has asked what to me is the obvious question: What would it look like or feel like to watch the world being “eaten up” by a black hole (if it took a few days), and what would it feel like when the black hole reached us and started eating US up? Would it be like an explosion? An earthquake? A black cloud coming closer and closer and then …. nothingness?

I simply cannot believe I am the only person who has these questions. But nobody else asks them.

Kathy, not to be too terribly depressing, but Dr. Tyson has spoken on that very subject many times and provided a fairly detailed answer. First, when “looking” at a black hole, what we would see is exactly… nothing. The gravitational force of a black hole is such that not even light can escape it, so (at least in the visual light range) no image would reach your eyes. You would, however, see two beams of energy streaming away from the black hole at opposite poles.

What would happen to you? Dr. Tyson describes it as a process of spaghettification. As you approach the event horizon of the black hole, (or, in the case of the Hadron experiment scenario, as the event horizon approaches you!) you would begin to fall toward it. Sadly, the gravitational tidal forces surrounding it are so great that, (assuming you are falling feet first) the black hole would pull your feet faster than it pulled your head. This causes you to stretch out and eventually snap into two pieces. The pieces are also stretched out and continue bifurcating until you became a long string of dots which eventually reach the event horizon and fall over the edge and down into the singularity. So I’m afraid you could only enjoy the view of this spectacle from a distance and, even then, only for a very short time.

Now that I’ve cheered everyone up immensely on this Sunday morning, have a great day! Please feel free to join us on Tuesday to talk to Dr. Tyson and we’ll see if we can’t get some better answers.

e-mail the author: jazzshaw@gmail.com

CORRECTION: In the original column, I wrote that some scientists were concerned that a potential, stable black hole might “eat” the planet in “a matter of a few days.” As has been pointed out at the LHC Facts web site, most of the objecting scientists in fact think that the process may take “years or even decades.” Supporters of the project feel that such a theoretical black hole would only grow at a rate of “one quark at a time” and could take thousands of years to consume the Earth.

Ummm… guys? If you’re trying to make me feel better, it’s not working.

See part one or skp ahead to part three.