• Question: I heard somewhere that there is some sort of particle accelerator in the world. I don't know if you can answer this or not but would it be possible to create some sort of vacuum/black hole that could destroy the world?

    Asked by 284drud47 to Anne, Florence, Mark, Neil, Sinead on 15 Nov 2015.
    • Photo: Florence McCarthy

      Florence McCarthy answered on 15 Nov 2015:

      Yes there is the LHC in CERN on the swiss/french border, and unlikely for a black hole to form as you would need an enormous amount of mass to get that level of gravity.

    • Photo: Mark Collins

      Mark Collins answered on 15 Nov 2015:

      Hi, yes the LHC is in CERN is the most famous but there are others! There is one in Germany in Darmstadt where they make new elements, there is a mother one in California and I am very sure there is a fourth in the United States as well but none are as big or as powerful as the LHC as this is designed to look at particles much smaller than an electron, the actual particles that make an electron, the Leptons, Quarks, Neutrinos and Bosons and even they are made up of even smaller particles than that! This is the quantum world.

      It is highly unlikely this will form a black hole as Florence has said there is just insufficient mass to create one. I have read a prediction (or a theory) that within the LHC you might form very tiny, infinitely small black holes but they would decay in an even smaller period of time so we could not even detect them if they occurred! I think we will leave that and all the parallel universe debates for the books of fiction and Hollywood movies!

    • Photo: Sinead Balgobin

      Sinead Balgobin answered on 16 Nov 2015:

      There are a few particle accelerators! Fortunately they would never be able to make a black hole big enough to destroy the world: black holes require a very very huge mass to exist and our particle accelerators are too small.

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