Chapter 31 Man-made black hole swallows Earth

In the process of the gradual evolution of stars in the universe, with the demise of their own mass, a black hole will be formed.A black hole is a celestial body with such a strong gravitational force that not even light can escape.It is like a bottomless pit in the universe, once any matter falls into it, it can no longer escape.Because black holes can swallow light, the existence of black holes cannot be observed with the naked eye.The only way to judge a black hole is to indirectly observe or infer its existence based on measuring its effect and influence on surrounding celestial bodies. This is the natural evolution process of cosmic celestial bodies, the result of the action of nature.But when the LHC launched in September 2009, some critics predicted that the world's largest particle accelerator would create a black hole big enough to swallow the entire world.Rumors that a man-made black hole is about to swallow the entire earth began to flourish.

Doomsmen believe that this artificial black hole will absorb the tiny matter around it little by little at the very beginning, until it can swallow up the entire planet inhabited by humans in the end.Even though some scientists came out to refute the rumors that the probability that this particle accelerator can create a black hole is very small, but this cannot cover up people's panic.In the spring of 2008, a group of independent scientists filed a lawsuit in court seeking to force the block on starting the Hadron Collider. However, all this is in vain.Now, this hadron collider has already been "on duty", and so far it has not caused any disasters to the earth on which human beings depend.

The British "Guardian" once reported the top ten disasters that may happen to human beings in the next 70 years.Among them, the "black hole" engulfing the earth is listed as the top ten disasters.The plot proposed in Hollywood movies to use the principle of particle collision to create an "artificial black hole" to swallow the earth has once again focused people's attention on this cutting-edge scientific field. The earliest artificial black hole ideas were born in the 1980s.A Canadian university professor proposed that the performance of sound waves in a fluid is very similar to that of light in a black hole. If the speed of the fluid exceeds the speed of sound, an artificial black hole can be built in the fluid.A professor of physics in the United States also conducted related research on this theory, and finally he concluded that: the theory that artificial black holes destroy the earth is purely a fiction in novels and movies, and it is impossible for artificial black holes created by real particle collisions to swallow Earth.

Today, the particle accelerator that has been born is located in a tunnel about 17 miles long at CERN, the world's largest particle physics research center on the border of France and Switzerland.Therefore, it is also known as the world's largest "black hole factory".Related reports show that European scientists will use particle accelerators to create artificial black holes in a short period of time.Scientists will collide with protons in the experiment, simulating the energy and conditions within one trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, and then carefully analyze the debris produced by the impact to explore clues to the nature of matter and new forces and balances in nature .

The researchers calmly faced the doubts of scientists around the world, and some responsible persons stood up and said that even if an artificial black hole is really created, it will not have any impact on the current normal life.Because all black holes emit cosmic rays, small black holes release far more matter than they absorb, so they evaporate instantly before they absorb matter.That said, black holes created using particle collisions are harmless. In the end, the person in charge said frankly: "The purpose of establishing the Large Hadron Collider in Europe is to unravel the mystery of the Big Bang, not to create black holes to destroy the earth."

People's worries did not disappear as scientists refuted the rumors.Many scientists worry that the man-made black hole will get out of control and eventually become bigger and bigger, first attracting the entire laboratory, and then the entire earth.While the general consensus in the physics community today is that this is unlikely to happen, there are others who believe the danger should not be underestimated. In fact, in the particle accelerators made by humans, apart from worrying that the black holes created by humans will swallow the earth, there are three other possible dangerous events: the first one is that nuclear explosions may occur in heavy ion collisions process, and nuclear fusion will have a cascade reaction, destroying the entire world. In the 1930s and 1940s, some people were very worried about this.

The second possibility is the transition to the vacuum state.The current universe is not a completely stable state, it is a metastable state, and some scientists believe that it may move towards a lower state.If something like this happens, there could be a chain reaction. The third possibility is the emergence of a strange state of matter.According to the current quark theory, ordinary matter is composed of up quark and down quark, but there is also a kind of quark called strange quark. When particles collide, a strange state of matter may appear.After this state is formed, it has the potential to turn the surrounding matter into exotic matter as well.This will also have a chain reaction.

None of these possibilities can be completely ruled out from the existing scientific principles.But scientists can disprove that it cannot happen in an environment similar to the earth.From the existing scientific reasoning, it cannot be completely ruled out that nuclear explosions, engulfment by artificial black holes, strange matter states and vacuum transitions occur on artificial accelerators.But the energy of particle accelerators manufactured by humans is still very low, and the energy of particles in cosmic rays is one trillion times higher than that in human particle accelerators.If what people expected happens, not only will humans no longer be able to see the moon, but even the surrounding stars will be sucked in by the black holes created by particle accelerators.If the accelerator could have such a catastrophic event, then this kind of thing would have happened on the earth long ago.

It has also been claimed that man-made black holes could be used as weapons of war.This is even considered a joke by the mainstream scientific community.However, in the process of the rapid development of science and technology, it is too early to draw conclusions on whether human beings have the ability to control the trend of science and technology.