|
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.
Click Here to return to the search form.
|
|
|
|
|
Copyright © 2020 The Regents of the University of California,
All Rights Reserved.
UCSB Terms of Use
|
|
|