World safe from mad scientists
After all, we may be safe from the mad scientists at CERN (just kidding: some of these guys are not yet entirely mad) producing low-velocity black holes that could have swallowed the Earth if Hawking radiation just happened not to work after all. Well, the mad scientists at RHIC may have just created black holes (or more correctly objects that act like black holes but may be supersymmetric dual objects to black holes (no, I don't really understand what I'm writing here, just pretending)) and observed them evaporate through Hawking radiation.
If this is confirmed, it means three different things:
- Black holes have been produced in a laboratory. Scary, but they are very small ones.
- Hawking radiation works
- Superstring effects have been observed
An of course, the Earth is safe from destruction by artificial black holes. So we're back to worrying about nuclear holocaust, climate changes, pollution, strangelets, massive epidemies, ateroids hitting the Earth. Ew, that was a close one.
Source:
through Julien Ellie.