When Dr.
Stephen Hawking and I visited the Large Hadron Collider, he expected unexpected
advances in physics. His dream may not be impossible. We descended a freight
elevator underground into his five-story cavern where his ATLAS experiment at
the legendary CERN Institute, the legendary European Institute for Nuclear
Research near Geneva. CERN Executive Director Rolf Heuer limped restlessly.
That was in 2009, he said, citing concerns that CERN’s new Large Hadron
Collider LHC would produce black holes and other forms of alien matter that
could destroy Earth. , someone was suing in the United States.
LHC is a
ring-shaped particle accelerator built primarily to produce the Higgs boson,
the missing link in the standard model of particle physics of the time. Built
in a tunnel under the Swiss-French border, the 27-kilometer (about 17-mile)
device will propel protons and antiprotons in counter-rotating jets in circular
vacuum tubes at up to 99.9999991% the speed of light. Accelerate.
At three
locations along the ring, jets of accelerated particles can be directed into
high-energy collisions, restoring conditions comparable to those in the
universe with temperatures exceeding 100 degrees Celsius just seconds after the
hot Big Bang. To do. Billions of degrees. The particle droplet trajectories
produced by these violent head-on collisions are detected by millions of
sensors stacked like mini Lego blocks on giant detectors such as ATLAS
detectors and Compact Muon Solenoids (CMS). increase.
Image of the
Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS). (Credit: Naeblys via Getty Images) The case was
quickly dismissed on the grounds that “a speculative fear of future harm
is not, in fact, sufficient harm to warrant standing.” An explosion had
occurred on an earlier attempt, and ATLAS and her CMS detector soon found
traces of the Higgs boson in the debris from the particle collision. But so far
the LHC has not produced a black hole. Why was it not completely unreasonable
for Stephen, and I think Heuer, to expect that the LHC might be able to
generate black holes? is the collapsed remnant of a massive star. But this is
too narrow a field of view. Anything can become a black hole if squeezed into a
small enough volume. Even a single proton-antiproton pair accelerated to near
the speed of light and collided in a powerful particle accelerator can form a
black hole if the collision concentrates enough energy into a small enough
volume. will be done. It would certainly be a small black hole of ephemeral
existence, as it would evaporate instantly if it emitted Hawking radiation
If Steven
and Hoyer’s wish to create a black hole had come true, it would have allowed
dozens of particle physicists to study nature at ever-shorter distances by
colliding particles with ever-higher energies. It would have meant the
year-long quest was over. Particle accelerators are similar to microscopes, but
gravity appears to fundamentally limit their resolution, causing black holes to
form if the energy is raised too high to probe increasingly smaller volumes.
At
this point, adding more energy to the collider would create a larger black
hole, rather than adding more energy. Interestingly, therefore, gravity and
black holes completely subvert the conventional physics assumption that higher
energies explore shorter distances. The end point in building increasingly
large accelerators seems to be the emergence of macroscopically curved
space-time rather than the tiny primitive building blocks that are the ultimate
dream of every reductionist. Gravity shortens short distances to long
distances, and the structure of physical reality is essentially an ordered
system of nested scales that can be cut apart one by one to reach minute
components. I mock the deep-rooted notion that Gravity, and thus space-time
itself, seems to have an element of anti-reductionism.
