Black holes and Icecream.

Well, I made it through the night just fine despite the doctor's concerns.
Other than a bit of a fever and a continous night sweat, I actualy felt pretty good. Certainly no need for a stay in hospital that's for sure.

I had a quiet, relaxing day. I popped down to Bad Tolz again, this time to purchase a Bluetooth USB adaptor for my laptop. It was quite a long walk across town to the computer shop, but well worth it for the exercise and the scenery. Once at the shop I asked the lady if she spoke English. "No" was the reply. Bugger! Oh well , I know for a fact that even in Germany a 'Bluetooth USB adaptor' is called just that. So I asked for one. She replied "no" and tried to give me directions to a mobile phone shop. I resisted and asked if it was OK to look around. The first shelf I came to was stacked with the very same item that I required. I took it to the counter, pointed to the label and read it out to her 'Bluetooth USB adaptor'. She again tried to argue with me in what I choose to call 'Germish'. That's 90% German and 10% English. ('Genglish' on the other hand, is anything that I can eventually understand). I ignored her and gave her the money. Very glad that I didn't take her word for it and have to walk all that way back across town empty handed.

Dinner provided me with a variation of the same scenario. I went to Il Tegaminos again, and while waiting for my pasta to arrive I couldn't help but smile at the irony of sitting in a large restaurant full of people chatting away in German, while the radio played a continuous stream of English pop songs. And there I was, probably the only person in the whole place that could understand them!

After watching a couple of young ladies devour their chocolate sundaes, I decided I'd order one for myself. The service was quite slow, and after sitting and observing almost every single person there, I eventually got bored and starting thinking about all the current hype over the safety of the Large Hadron Collider. ..and how some people think that it's going to create a black hole and the world will be devoured in the blink of an eye.
Now I don't know a lot about particle accelerators, God particles and the like. But I do have a fairly good grasp on common sense. Take the Y2K fiasco, people were saying that the world would grind to a halt, planes would fall from the skies and all our computer systems would crash.
I pointed out that computers had no concept of time other than what we entered into them. All anyone needed to do prior to the big day was boot up the computer, change the system date to just before midnight 31/12/99 and watch for system errors. They could then rectify them before the day arrived. I have a feeling every IT person on the planet knew this... but hey.. there was lots of money to be made.

It's the same with this Black Hole baloney. There's good money to be made by the media in scaring the hell out of everyone by telling them the world is going to end.. yet again.
OK, This is what my unqualified common sense told me as I sat waiting for my chocolate sundae to arrive.

Firstly particles collide in our atmosphere all the time (I read this somewhere) they don't create black holes and if they did they would decay very quickly and harmlessly. They are just too small to have any affect on anything. If you think about the sort of black holes that we see in the movies, these have enormous mass for their size, their gravitational pull is such that nothing can escape.. not even light. Hence the name 'Black Hole'. These are usually created when a star collapses.
OK lets shrink things down a little.. so lets just assume for a minute that the LHC produced a micro sized black hole. It would have less gravitational pull than a single grain of sand. How on earth is that going to be strong enough to suck the entire planet in on itself ! and even if it did somehow manage to do that, and the entire planet was pulled down to the size of a basketball it would still only have the gravitational pull of the original earth. Still not enough to pull a satellite out of orbit or the moon towards us. (yeah I'm ignoring centrifugal forces just for a minute! OK). So where's all that energy supposed to come from? It just doesn't stack up.

So there.. My theory, completely uneducated, on why we will not all die in the coming months from being devoured by a black hole. Sure beats talking about cornflakes! :)

..Night ..Ron