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I heard that when particles are accelerated to light speed (300000 km/h), then collide, it opens a warp in spacetime, like a miniature black hole. Is this true? Also, could we use this information to tell what is in a black hole?
Question Date: 2016-01-21
Answer 1:

The speed of light in vacuum is actually 1.08x109 km/h or 3.00x108 m/s. According to the theory of special relativity, no object can move faster than the speed of light. In fact, even modern physics experiments, conducted in cutting-edge particle accelerators, cannot accelerate particles all the way up to the speed of light (but they can get within a few m/s of it).

The world's largest and most famous particle accelerator is the Large Hadron Collider or LHC, built by an international group of physicists in Europe known as CERN. A few years ago, there were some articles published with concerns that LHC experiments might create miniature black holes, but CERN scientists responded that the energy of these experiments were not expected to be high enough to stabilize black holes and, even if one were to appear, it would quickly decay due to Hawking radiation. Of course, scientists have not proven the Standard Model of particle physics (nor do we expect to be able to), so we just have to take their word for it. So far, so good--the LHC has been operating smoothly since 2013.


Answer 2:

No, it's not true.

First, the speed of light is 300,000 km/second, not per hour.

Second, you can't actually get particles accelerated to the speed of light because of special relativity: the closer you get, the more energy you have to put in to make them ever so slightly faster. I suppose you could put in so much energy that you really do make a black hole, but this is not something we could do in a laboratory because small black holes (and that's all we would have the power to make) evaporate so quickly that we'd never see them.



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