Blackholes: From Fantasy to the New Fear Mongering

For many years scientist's argued amongst themselves about the existence of Black Holes. They were a thing of science fiction. For awhile scientists used the Einstien-Hilbert variation to show that the black hole could not exist. The problem they faced was a simple variant of not taking into account the boundary. After the advent of Hubble, The Hawking Temperature, and modern science, we know now that they are around, and more prevalent than once thought. We have even captured images of binary black holes.

A black hole was said to be of such gravitational strength that light could not even escape it's might grasp. How many sci-fi flicks have you watched that the ship is going to "fall" into a black hole. We now know that black holes actually discharge light which is actually plasma. The most powerful of these space sharks emit almost an aura around themselves. This is seen around the event horizon. This is where our little boundary problem that was solved with the Gibbons-Hawking by adding the boundary and the extrinsic curvature to the equation. This light/plasma that black holes emit is extremely hot. Think about the fact that this is most likely a dead sun, eating up every gas, particle, and many times, other stars. For those who had the fortune, or misfortune depending on the professor, remember the Zeroth Law that was drilled in. 'The Zeroth Law of black-hole thermodynamics states that the surface gravity (temperature) of stationary black holes is constant over the horizon.' Simply put, it stays really, really hot around these things. Using the Third Law we also know that most likely the black hole will never cool off. The "infinate number of steps are required to bring the temperature of a black hole to zero". Our ship spinning out of control would burn up long before it even reached the horizon.

Now that we have determined that something "evil" is out there, we have a new fear to put into people. First it was the asteriod or comet slamming into the planet, then it was Planet X. Still being used by some of the 2012 wacko's out there. Even the newest Star Trek used "Red Matter" to create black holes, of course the Enterprise was able to escape and we all made it through. But the new thing to say, it will cause a black hole. The funniest one I heard was a 'scientist' although no credits have appeared is stating that if we create a "warp jump" this will cause a black hole. He's worried about events around 400 years if ever in the making. Maybe that's what's happening to all those aliens abducting people, they have to flee in a hurry and are gobbled up by the black holes their ships create. The most popular that spread over the web, and then of course the well knowledged journalists, was the Large Hadron Collider at C.E.R.N. This is supposed to created micro black holes that will float down to the center of the planet and gobble us up from the inside out. There are several problems with this. Number one, the equation and gravity mass just won't work. The "black hole" would collapse upon itself long before it even hit the side. The amount of gravity it takes to do this is incredibly high, in the hundreds of powers! IF any anti-matter would be produced, the second it hit any matter there would be an incident. Of a very large magnitude. Let me state that again, if anti-matter hits any sort of matter it will ignite. No vacuum's to suck it into a safe chamber, or any other device. You would need air to stablilize the anti-matter and send it on it's way through the vacuum to hit device. If it hits ANY matter, including atomic particles of O, or help us all H. We have something called an Hydrogen (H) bomb. Imagine 1 gram of molecular hydrogen igniting with 1 gram of antimatter. This is an explosion in the factor of 1000's of Hydrogen bomb levels. I would rather drink Dark Matter then deal with that scene. The problem with sci-fi is that it is not real enough. The true devastation of anti-matter is somewere along biblical proportions to put it mildly. Sorry Dan Brown, no hope in your book's prophecy yet. As of now the only fear we should have of the black hole is the cosmic rays that they project out into the universe. Now one good blast of those would burn away the atmosphere and flame the planet to a crisp. But for now we are safe and sound, well almost. Bad movies are still being made.

1.  String Theory by Elias Kiritsis.  Princeton University Press, 2007

2.  Nuclear Physics by Carlos A. Bertulani.  Princeton University Press, 2007