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Originally Posted by Augi
Also, a black hole would not be bound by anything to stay in the "containment field" of the accelerator, because a black hole does not retain charge/magnetic properties (as far as I have read, I may withdraw this later). Any microscopic black hole would just fall into the Earth. Evaporation is just a theory (one I thought was proven 8 years ago in the Fermilab... must have been a different discussion I had in nerd club).
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OK, I got that half-wrong, but from the CERN site:
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If the LHC can produce microscopic black holes, cosmic rays of much higher energies would already have produced many more. Since the Earth is still here, there is no reason to believe that collisions inside the LHC are harmful.
Black holes lose matter through the emission of energy via a process discovered by Stephen Hawking. Any black hole that cannot attract matter, such as those that might be produced at the LHC, will shrink, evaporate and disappear. The smaller the black hole, the faster it vanishes. If microscopic black holes were to be found at the LHC, they would exist only for a fleeting moment. They would be so short-lived that the only way they could be detected would be by detecting the products of their decay.
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and about strangelets:
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Strangelets are hypothetical small pieces of matter whose existence has never been proven. They would be made of 'strange quarks' – heavier and unstable relatives of the basic quarks that make up stable matter. Even if strangelets do exist, they would be unstable. Furthermore, their electromagnetic charge would repel normal matter, and instead of combining with stable substances they would simply decay. If strangelets were produced at the LHC, they would not wreak havoc. If they exist, they would already have been created by high-energy cosmic rays, with no harmful consequences.
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Unjustified fears are easy to come by without research, but I would consider the fears about black holes and strangelets as unfounded as the claims that cell phones cause brain cancer.