Particle Smasher's Black Holes Would Be Tiny

Ka-Boom | Video: Discovery Tech

Today officials at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, formally switched on the Large Hadron Collider, the so-called "doomsday machine" under Geneva, Switzerland that will smash protons against protons with so much force that critics say it could create a black hole.

CERN scientists say that a black hole is "virtually impossible." Martin Rees, a U.K. physicist, has put the odds of a CERN black hole at one in 50 million. Cynics have pointed out that those odds are about the same as some state-sponsored lotteries.

But when the fate of the world is at stake any risk is too great a risk, contend two groups, one in the United States and one in Europe, who are suing to stop the LHC from operating. Other people have threatened to take matters into their own hands, issuing death threats to CERN scientists and theoretical physicists.

Frank Wilczek, the 2004 Nobel Prize winner and a professor of theoretical physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is one of the scientists who has received death threats. He points out there are massive black holes and then there are smaller, much less destructive black holes.

According to Wilzcek, fears of an Earth-gobbling black hole are grounded in the popular idea that all black holes are galactic monsters just waiting for the chance to gobble up any nearby star or planet that gets too close.

While supermassive black holes, like the one at the center of our galaxy, do gobble up stars and planets, microscopic black holes, like the ones the LHC could create, would look and act completely differently.

"It's like we only had one word for every animal out there," said Wilczek. "It's like they had elephants in mind when they came up with the word 'animal.' But little amoebas are animals too."

"The word is the same but the object is very different from the standard image that people think of."

If (and that remains a big "if") the LHC creates a black hole it will be extremely tiny, much smaller than a single atom, said Wilzcek. Its mass will be the same as the two protons that created it. Its range will be small -- only a few times the diameter of the two protons.

According to Wilczek, that's too small for the baby black hole to eat enough particles to grow to any real size. With no food, the black hole will simply wink out of existence in a fraction of a second.

To create a stable black hole, one capable of consuming the Earth, the black hole would have to be several hundred tons. A LHC-generated black hole would weigh a tiny fraction of a gram.

So what impact would a small, LHC-generated black hole have?