Black Holes Show How Limited Man’s Actions Are

From Yahoo.com

Scientists have witnessed the rare spectacle of a supermassive black hole devouring a star that had ventured too close -- an event that occurs about once in 10,000 years, they reported on Wednesday.

Matter-sucking black holes normally lurk dormant and undetected at the centre of galaxies, but can occasionally be tracked by the scraps left over from their stellar fests.

"Black holes, like sharks, suffer from a popular misconception that they are perpetual killing machines," said researcher Ryan Chornock from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts.

"Actually, they're quiet for most of their lives. Occasionally a star wanders too close, and that's when a feeding frenzy begins."

If a star passes too close, the black hole's gravitational pull can rip it apart before sucking in its gases, which are heated by the friction and start to glow -- giving away the silent killer's hiding place.

A computer simulated photo from Nasa (Yahoo/AFP)

Scientists can only watch in awe.

While it is true that contemporary scientists have been experimenting with man made black hole machine via the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to study several theories which I earlier pointed out, such as the Higgs boson “elementary particles cause matter to have mass”, validity of the Grand Unification Theory (are electromagnetism, strong nuclear force and weak nuclear force a single manifestation?), existence of the superstring theory (quantum gravity) and dark matter and dark energy, yet they cannot explain much of why black holes exists, the role it plays, or how a catastrophic disaster (Armageddon) can be avoided.

Yet the solar system where planet earth belongs to faces the same black swan risk from black holes as any planetary or star systems.

As I wrote in 2010 (emphasis original)

Yes, you may forget the farcical anthropogenic climate change, because the forces of nature would be exponentially be way far far far far more powerful and potent than the outcome from any of our collective destructive actions.

Besides, as remarked by the scientists interviewed in the TV documentary program, like any part of nature, our world operates on its own cycle. This means that the “ice age” could be just around the corner in some thousands of years to come, while the sun will expire on its own, by running out of fuel to burn, in about 5 billion years, and that today’s “aging” earth, even without the sun’s demise, will likely meet its end on its own.

And the sad part is that there is nothing mortal man can do to stop it. Every species or anything else that is part of nature will cyclically become extinct.

What’s my point in showing this?

Comedian George Carlin in this video has rightly been saying that too much self importance has been given in what man can do over the environment, such that we make a political spectacle/fuzz out of it.

In reality, humans represent only an iota in the overall spectrum of the universe.

Also our knowledge has been severely constrained to comprehend nature in its entirety, in as much as even understanding human action, the digital age notwithstanding.

In short, parlaying limited and presumptive of knowledge of the environment into public policies are fraught with the risks of unintended consequences. The existence of black holes only underscores this.

LHC Particle Collider/Black Hole Machine: Doomsday Deferred or Fears Unwarranted?

Mission Accomplished. Large Hadron Collider (LHC) successfully launched.

From BBC,

``Three decades after it was conceived, the world's most powerful physics experiment has sent the first beam around its 27km-long tunnel.

 

``Engineers cheered as the proton particles completed their first circuit of the underground ring which houses the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)...

``On Wednesday, they sent a proton beam around the full circumference of the LHC tunnel.

 

``Technicians had to be on the lookout for potential problems: "There are on the order of 2,000 magnetic circuits in the machine. This means there are 2,000 power supplies which generate the current which flows in the coils of the magnets," Steve Myers, head of the accelerator and beam department, told BBC News.

 

``If there was a fault with any of these, he said, it would have stopped the beam. They were also wary of obstacles in the beam pipe which could prevent the protons from completing their first circuit."

Has the fears been exaggerated? Or has doomsday simply been deferred?

The LHC controversy seems to me like a page taken out of the debate over "Global Warming".

Will Tomorrow Be Doomsday? “Black Hole” Machine Switches On

For our apocalyptist pundits, here is another good fodder; we should probably SELL because…

it is the END of the world!

 

But I guess it would be too late for that because the supposed date for the “end of the world” is said to happen tomorrow, Wednesday September 10^th!

 

How?

 

Because of this…

From Popsci.com: Large Hadron Collider: A machine that would “give birth to microscopic black holes”

 

A brief description from Newsky.com

 

``The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is 12 stories high and cost £5b. It is buried more than 300ft under the Alpine foothills in a 17mile tunnel along the Swiss-French border.

 

``When the giant machine gets going, the LHC will blast protons - one of the building blocks of atoms - at a velocity just shy of the speed of light, generating temperatures of more than a trillion degrees centigrade.

 

``Each proton beam will pack as much energy as a Eurostar train travelling at 150 kilometres per hour.

 

``In layman's terms, the LHC will take protons and smash them together at high speeds.

 

``The resulting collisions will hopefully replicate conditions found in the moments following the Big Bang - or the beginning of the universe - and scientists will study the fallout.”

 

The Hadron Collider is scheduled to be switched on tomorrow.

 

Critics say that such experiment runs the risks of creating unwieldy “black hole” that might devour earth!

 

This from the BBC, ``But there are a small but significant group of naysayers who worry that the LHC is not 100% safe. Opponents say it is possible the collider could produce micro black holes and dangerous "strangelets", and that catastrophic effects from these cannot be ruled out.”

 

Some people think the risks are serious enough to bring it to court.

 

This from the Guardian

 

``If you think it's unlikely that we will all be sucked into a giant black hole that will swallow the world, as German chemistry professor Otto Rössler of the University of Tübingen posits, and so carry on with your life as normal, only to find out that it's true, you'll be a bit miffed, won't you?

 

``If, on the other hand, you disagree with theoretical physicist Prof Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith of the UK Atomic Energy Agency, who argues that fears of possible global self-ingestion have been exaggerated, and decide to live the next two days as if they were your last, and then nothing whatsoever happens, you'd feel a bit of a fool too.

 

``Rössler apparently thinks it "quite plausible" that the "mini black holes" the Cern atom-smasher creates "will survive and grow exponentially and eat the planet from the inside". So convinced is he that he has lodged an EU court lawsuit alleging that the project violates the right to life guaranteed under the European Convention of Human Rights.”

 

However most experts say that we shouldn’t be alarmed and that the experiment will run smoothly and that many information about universe could be uncovered to benefit us. Again from the BBC, `` However, the consensus of physicists is that the collider is perfectly harmless. Micro black holes would vanish almost instantaneously.”

 

We just pray that things will turn out fine as the consensus expects. Otherwise, doomsayers would be proven right for the wrong reasons-we should have sold early to enjoy our last days as running for the hills won’t do any good.