Nothing But Love :: golf blogger

On String Theory and Black Holes

As you all know, the Large Hadron Collider is under construction under Switzerland. It will accelerate atomic particles and then smash them into each other at near the speed of light. I find this stuff interesting. Why, you may ask? Answer: It's a kid thing. Probably mainly a boy-kid thing. We'd get together and ram our toy cars into each other head-on at high speeds to see what would happen. We'd put stuff out in the road to see what happened when passing cars ran over the stuff. It's the same reason Dave Letterman threw stuff off the building and analyzed in slow motion what happened to things getting smashed.

It's interesting, fun stuff.

Physicists now claim that black holes might be created in the Large Hadron Collider. Physicists aren't worried because the almighty, super-brained, physicist-of-all-physicists Stephen Hawking proved way back in the 1970's that black holes evaporate, giving off a lot of radiation, which is called Hawking radiation. A better name is "Steve's radiation," but physicists keep things all mysterious and hard for us undereducated folks to understand.

Physicists say that if black holes are created in the Large Hadron Collider, they will be very, very small and evaporate in a split second.

So, I'm sitting here, trying to imagine a teeny, tiny black hole ... y'know, like how is it gonna look and stuff like that. Just for those of you who are first-time visitors ... the ones who Googled "Large Hadron Collider and black holes," and you are now here, thinking that I'm like some big physicist ... I'm not, y'know, like a real physicist. Hell, I'm not even a lame-ass engineer ... I'm not talkin' about railroad engineers, they're totally cool ... the other kind, the kind who think they know like everything because they went to college. I'm just a moron, as my wife affectionately calls me, pondering the forces of the universe.

Okay, having disclaimed any knowledge at all about the subject, I can tell you that I'm like totally concerned about man-made black holes. It doesn't seem that we, and by "we" I mean "physicists," have a good grasp on this black hole stuff. They, and by "they" I mean "physicists," will smash speeding charged particles to smithereens, like toy cars in our kid-physics experiments; and I fear that the black holes will emerge from the swirling eddies of energy and junk of smashed sub-atomic particles, and through these teeny, weeny black holes, strings, the ones from string theory, will escape, spewing forth from the predicted 37 dimensions right into our three-dimensional world. They, and by "they" I mean "physicists," will have all these strings like totally tangled up in a multi-dimensional morass.

Then what do we, and by "we" I mean "physicists," real or surreal, do? I mean, like is there a plan for when this happens? What if I find a string flopping around on the side of the road and like, being all curious about physics, pick it up?

Posted by Bill at February 14, 2007 08:57 PM