Hi Mike,<br><br>Great question. <br><br>In my opinion, the article was not quite correct. The author suggests that the black hole would be "at rest, relative to the Earth's gravity well". If I understand physics correctly (and sometimes I don't), such a dense object would immediately take up an elliptical orbit within the Earth, with the apogee at the point where it was created. <br><br>In Hawking's paper entitled "Fuzzy Black Holes Have No Hair", Dr Hawking proposed that the event horizon of a black hole may actually oscillate and allow some of its matter to reappear or leak from the black hole when the event horizon contracts. This is the "Hawking Radiation" that the article refers to. The concern is that no one has ever detected Hawking Radiation, so the community remains somewhat divided on whether matter can actually leak out of a Black Hole. <br><br>If Dr. Hawking's theory is incorrect and a black hole is created in this matter, we would be stuck with a very tiny little monster that would slowly gobble up the Earth's matter. It would be interesting to try to calculate how long it could exist and grow before the tidal forces it creates started to be detectable by the occupants of our planet. At any rate, this would be a one way ticket to replacing Earth with a black hole that orbits our Sun.<br><br>Cheers!<br>Blake

Is there a timeframe set for this experiment ?<br>Year ?<br>Freddy

The most likely result of this experiment will not be the ridiculous notion of nano black holes, but rather the witnessing of more nano alchemy by virtue of nuclear fusion. <br><br>There was a recent article here about "Mega" Super Novas bypassing typically observed intermediate stages - gigantic stars short circuiting into total instantaneous annihilation. <br><br>The periodic table's rarest elements - the heavy ones - are statitical representations of the rare events that produce them - the confluence of shock waves producing the greatest density in the universe. <br><br>Outside of the presence of a mass much greater than the sun, a black hole is simply an impossibility. A black hole is not the same thing as an atomic nucleus. The likelihood is that we will discover much more about how specific nova activity produces specific isotopes. <br><br>As the capability of telescopes, spectrographs, and analyzing tools grows, the results of the colliding experiments will likely help us to zero in much closer one stellar mechanics and nature's own alchemy process. As far as making black holes on earth, I think we can be certain that any product of a collision will not last long enough to be of any consequence.<br><br>What it may yield is a much greater body of forensic analysis of nebular remains to understand more about previous generations of stars and how that led to current generations.

<blockquote class="blockquote"><div class="italic"><i>Mike Clemens said:</i><br><br>Personally I don't see anything wrong with making black holes within the Earths gravity well, what could go wrong?</div></blockquote><br>There's not a dog's chance in hell of Cern causing any problems for anybody (except those folks whose pet theories may go down the tubes). With all the things there are to worry about in this world, worrying about this is, being polite, a "non-starter."<br><br>LOL!

Physicist Gregory Benford wrote a scifi novel some years ago, <i>Cosm,</i> where an experiment similar to this one (colliding gold nuclei instead of lead) creates a miniature, expanding universe in one of the particle detectors. The science of the novel is better than the character development and dialog, but it's an interesting look at what might happen if the CERN machine triggered a highly improbable event. <br><br>Sure nothing can go wrong, the probabilities are too low to worry about, etc., etc., but IMO the Moon might be a better location for these kinds of experiments. <br><br><blockquote class="blockquote"><div class="italic"><i>Mike Clemens said:</i><br><br>Personally I don't see anything wrong with making black holes within the Earths gravity well, what could go wrong?</div></blockquote>