Stephen Hawking wanted scientists to ‘make black holes’ on Earth. Physics says it’s possible.

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“I hope you will make black holes,” Stephen mentioned with a broad smile. 

We exited the cargo carry that had taken us underground into the five-story cavern housing the ATLAS experiment on the CERN lab, the legendary European Group for Nuclear Analysis close to Geneva. CERN’s director common, Rolf Heuer, shuffled his ft uneasily. This was 2009, and somebody had filed a lawsuit in the USA, involved that CERN’s newly constructed Massive Hadron Collider, the LHC, would produce black holes or one other type of unique matter that would destroy Earth.

The LHC is a ring-shaped particle accelerator that was constructed, principally, to create Higgs bosons, the lacking hyperlink — on the time — within the Commonplace Mannequin of particle physics. Constructed in a tunnel beneath the Swiss-French border, its complete circumference is 27 kilometers (nearly 17 miles), and it accelerates protons and antiprotons operating in counter rotating beams in its round vacuum tubes to 99.9999991% of the pace of sunshine. At three places alongside the ring, the beams of accelerated particles might be directed into extremely energetic collisions, re-creating circumstances similar to these reigning within the universe a small fraction of a second after the recent large bang, when the temperature was greater than 1,000,000 billion levels. The tracks of the spray of particles created in these violent head-on collisions are picked up by thousands and thousands of sensors stacked like mini–Lego blocks to make up big detectors, together with the ATLAS detector and the Compact Muon Solenoid, or CMS.

Illustration of the  Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS). (Picture credit score: Naeblys through Getty Pictures)

The lawsuit was quickly to be dismissed on the grounds that “speculative worry of future hurt doesn’t represent an damage in reality adequate to confer standing.” In November of that 12 months the LHC was efficiently turned on — after an explosion at an earlier try — and the ATLAS and CMS detectors quickly discovered traces of Higgs bosons within the particles of the particle collisions. However, to this point, the LHC hasn’t made black holes.