[Nish]

Nish asked the Naked Scientists:
   
Why do some say a black hole may result from Large Hadron Collider experiments? I thought black holes are only a result of the death of very large stars.

What do you think?

[SteveFish]

Why?-- The people who say this are either looking for attention, or are very ignorant of the science involved.

[CliffordK]

I suppose if you define a black hole as containing matter in a form with greater density than that found in the nucleus of an atom, and experiencing an inward force of acceleration causing an escape velocity greater than the speed of light.

Then if the collision of particles might create super-compressed matter for an instant, as well as instantaneous deceleration forces similar to what is theorized to be the acceleration forces due to gravity within the black hole...  then one might be able to imagine that the couple of particles of matter might exist in a similar state to what is theorized, but unobservable in a black hole.

But, you're unlikely to get sucked into it.

The relevance might be another question as one is looking at an instantaneous deceleration force, rather than the more global and long term acceleration forces within the black hole and the force in the collider dissipates as soon as the kinetic energy is absorbed.

[JP]

There is a chance the LHC could create a black hole just by squashing enough matter into a small enough volume.  Of course, we haven't been able to check general relativity on those size scales, so we don't know for sure that tiny black holes could form in the LHC.

Even if you do form a tiny black hole, it would probably quickly evaporate since it would emit energy faster than it could suck matter in.  (We know that the smaller a black hole is the faster it emits energy.)

If you don't believe that argument, then consider that the earth is constantly bombarded with high energy particles, so that through the earth's history collisions like those at the LHC, and even higher-energy collisions have occurred.  We haven't been sucked into a black hole yet.