“I hope you can make a black hole,” Stephen said with a wide smile.
We stepped off the cargo lift and went underground into the five-story cavern where the ATLAS experiment at the legendary CERN laboratory, the legendary European Institute for Nuclear Research near Geneva. CERN Executive Director Rolf Heuer limps anxiously.This was in 2009, when CERN’s newly built Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Black Hole Or another form of exotic matter that could destroy the Earth.
The LHC is a ring-shaped particle accelerator, built primarily to produce the Higgs boson, then the missing link in the Standard Model of particle physics. Built in a tunnel under the Swiss-French border, with a circumference of 27 kilometers (nearly 17 miles), it accelerates protons and antiprotons by 99.9999991% in counter-rotating beams inside a circular vacuum tube. increase. speed of light. At three locations along the ring, beams of accelerated particles could be directed into high-energy collisions, and for a fraction of a second after the hot Big Bang, temperatures were above 20 degrees Celsius in the universe. A state equivalent to the state can be reproduced. One million degrees. The particle droplet trajectories produced by these violent head-on collisions are the result of millions of mini-LEGO bricks stacked up to form giant detectors such as the ATLAS detector and the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS). detected by the sensor.
The case was soon dismissed on the grounds that “speculative fear of future harm does not do enough harm to actually award status.” In November of the same year, the LHC was successfully powered up after an earlier experiment exploded, and soon ATLAS and CMS detectors found traces of the Higgs boson in the impact debris. But so far the LHC has not created a black hole.
But why wasn’t it completely unreasonable for Stephen, and I think Hoyer, to expect that the LHC might be able to generate black holes? It is thought to be the collapsed remnant of a massive star. But this is too restrictive a view, anything can become a black hole if squeezed into a small enough volume. Even if a single proton-antiproton pair were accelerated to nearly the speed of light and collided in a powerful particle accelerator, a black hole would form if the collision focused enough energy into a small enough volume. It would certainly be a small black hole with a fleeting existence. hawking radiation.
At the same time, if Steven and Hoyer’s hopes of creating black holes were to come true, it would be the perfection of particle physics to explore nature at ever-shorter distances by colliding particles with ever-increasing energies. It would have marked the end of decades of scholarly research. A particle collider is like a microscope, gravity Raising the energy too high in an attempt to peer into smaller volumes causes the formation of black holes, which seems to set a fundamental limit on resolution.
At that point, adding more energy would produce a larger black hole at the cost of further increasing the collider’s expanding power. Interestingly, therefore, gravity and black holes completely reverse the usual idea in physics that higher energies probe shorter distances. The end point of the construction of ever-larger accelerators appears to be an emerging macroscopic curved space-time, rather than the smallest basic building block that is the ultimate dream of every reductionist. Gravity, which loops from short distances to long distances, is deeply ingrained in the fact that the fabric of physical reality is a neat system of nested scales that can be peeled off piece by piece to reach the basic smallest building blocks. ridicule the idea Gravity, and therefore space-time itself, seems to have an element of anti-reductionism.
So at what microscopic scale does gravity-free particle physics translate into gravity-based particle physics? How much will it cost?) This is a question related to the unity of all powers, the theme of this chapter. The search for a unified framework encompassing all the fundamental laws of nature was already Einstein’s dream. It is directly related to whether multiverse cosmology really has the potential to offer another perspective on the design of the universe that drives our life. Because only by understanding how all particles and forces combine harmoniously can the uniqueness, or lack thereof, of the fundamental laws of physics, and at what level we expect it to change throughout the multiverse. Because it gives you more insight into what you can do.
Excerpt from About the origin of time. Copyright © 2023 by Thomas Hertog.
Published by Bantam, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
