Making black holes in the lab

Q: Can scientists create a black hole in a laboratory? What would it take to create a black hole in a lab?
Teodor, Bucharest, Romania

A: Recall what a black hole is: an object squeezed down to the ultimate limit. Its resulting force of gravity is so strong that nothing escapes the black hole, not even light. Black holes swallow anything that gets close enough. A big black hole eats even stars.

May 28, 2008, 2:49 pm. CERN, SWITZERLAND, LHC - Two particles (protons) race around the track in opposite directions, accelerating as they go. Their speed shoots to nearly that of light — the max. It's almost certain they'll hit. Looking good... They did it! A head-on collision. Tremendous impact kinetic energy converts to mass, resulting in a tiny kinetic mass (about 2.5x10 -23 kilograms*), which concentrates in an impossibly small space. It becomes a black hole! Just briefly (about 10-27 seconds). It's gone! Evaporated, as Stephen Hawking predicted. But not forgotten. We have learned much: Our Universe has at least one more dimension!

Science fiction? Maybe, but maybe we will create not one but thousands of black holes in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), within a year. These are exciting times.

What will it take for this scenario to be true? Much. For one thing, our Universe must be different from what we have thought it is. A different Universe at first seems a crazy notion, but it may really be different.

Back to that it a moment, but first, why must the Universe be different? Because in the straight forward view of the Universe where our 3-dimensional space has no hidden dimensions, we can't make a black hole in a lab, and never will.

Our problem lies with the dual nature of things. A proton is both a particle and a wave with, unfortunately, a vague position. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle says we can't know both a particle's position and momentum accurately. (One accurately but not both.)

The colliding protons in my hypothetical scenario have a kinetic-energy mass of 10 -23 kilograms. Since a proton is not just a particle but also a wave, it is smeared out over a distance of about 10-19 meters and, therefore, contained in a tiny volume of about 10 -57 cubic meters. That mass in such an infinitesimal volume has a big density: 1034 kilograms per cubic meter.

However, the collided protons density, even though enormous, is not dense enough to create a black hole. The colliding protons must attain the so-called Planck value of 1097 kilograms per cubic meter. Energies to produce such densities are far beyond any upgrade of the LHC.

OK. So, we're stuck with a lousy density of 1034 kilograms per cubic meter. How do we get a black hole out of the LHC? Easy, we hypothesize another dimension or maybe more.

Physicists have attacked the current theory of physics, the so-called Standard Model, almost since we developed it in the late1960's, because it has flaws. The Standard Model, based on quantum mechanics, explains much of the Universe, admirably, and Einstein's theory of general relativity explains gravity. Neither theory, however, probes black holes or the first instant of the big bang. Neither the standard model nor general relativity defines mass.

Also, both the Standard Model and general relativity leave us totally in the dark why gravity is so much weaker than all the other forces. Calling electromagnetism a '1', gives the strong force weighing in at 20, the weak force at 10-7 and gravity at a insignificant 10-36. Why so weak?

In the 1990's, physicists developed new theories to answer the weak gravity question. The theories propose that Space has extra physical dimensions. Instead of the three dimensions we see around us, the Universe may actually be comprised of another one, two, three... or ten (which superstring theory conjectures) or, possibly, more.

The theory I like, though, requires only one extra dimension. With that, we can grow black holes in the lab.

Well, I've run out of room, again. Another time, I shall continue the story of Space's extra dimensions and making black holes in the lab.

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* A brief note on sizes: 10 -23 is 10 divided by a trillion trillion, a very small number. 1034 is almost a trillion trillion trillion, a very large number.

Further Reading:

How black holes trap light, WonderQuest

How black holes die, WonderQuest

Tracking black holes — do they exist?, WonderQuest

Quantum black holes, Scientific American

Fermilab at Work, Fermilab

How do physicists study particles?, CERN

The Charm of Strange Quarks: Mysteries and Revolutions of Particle Physics

(Answered June 4, 2007)