World safe from mad scientists
After all, we may be safe from the mad scientists at
CERN (just kidding: some
of these guys are not yet entirely mad) producing
low-velocity
black holes
that
could have swallowed the Earth
if
Hawking radiation
just happened
not to work after all. Well, the mad scientists at
RHIC may have just
created black holes (or more correctly objects that act like
black holes but may be supersymmetric dual objects to black
holes (no, I don't really understand what I'm writing here,
just pretending)) and observed them evaporate through
Hawking radiation.
If this is confirmed, it means three different things:
- Black holes have been produced in a laboratory. Scary, but they are very small ones.
- Hawking radiation works
- Superstring effects have been observed
An of course, the Earth is safe from destruction by
artificial black holes. So we're back to worrying about
nuclear holocaust, climate changes, pollution,
strangelets, massive epidemies, ateroids hitting the Earth. Ew, that
was a close one.
Source:
through
Julien Ellie.