Catching a Black Hole

At the science blog of the NewScientist, I came across an article that, even though probably meant as a humouristic piece,  I found nevertheless interesting enough to think about a bit more. In it Joe Marchant, the article’s author, began with this:

How do you get rid of a black hole that’s threatening to gobble the Earth? It could be as simple as popping it in a box and shooting it into space.

A handful of doomsayers have argued that the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator at CERN near Geneva, currently gearing up to start smashing protons together this autumn, could produce Earth-destroying black holes.

Now, this is a strange concept. Strange enough for me to dig a bit deeper.

First, the author writes loosely about black holes. The one’s in question here however are not the massive black holes that have been proved to exist, but hypothetical micro black holes (mbH). If they indeed exist, they would be very tiny.

The smallest mBH, i.e. the one that requires the least energy to create would have the dimension of the Planck length l_p (dimension of 10^-35 m) and the Planck mass m_p(dimension of 10^-8 kg or 10¹⁶ TeV/c²). To create the mBH, the Planck mass would have to be crammed into a region of the size of the Planck length. As a comparison, the LHC will be colliding protons at an energy of 7 TeV, or around 7/10,000,000,000,000,000 of what is needed to create such an mbh.
If the usual theories hold, it is simply not going to happen. However, there are theories, most notably some string theories, that would lower the energy required to a the GeV range and then it could happen. So let’s assume that it does happen. What now?

Chances are that it would not even be noticed, because it would evaporate, i.e. give off all its energy, due to Hawking radiation in a very short amount of time in the range of 10^-97 s. So why are we so certain, that such mbhs are not being created and are not decaying all around us all the time? We may just not be able to see them, because they disappear quickly after having been created. In fact, that behavior would be consistent with the quantum foam or with the zero-point field behavior. Such mbhs with the above properties are also called Planck particles.

Great, but what if, due to some little understood interaction with the zero-point field the mbh does not evaporate or could be prevented from evaporation? Which are the properties such a thing would have, could it be controlled and could it be used to generate energy out of nowhere?

If there is such a thing as a stable charged micro black hole then it surely is possible to cage it into an electromagnetic field, as the author proposes. This is because the gravitational pull of the mBH would be small as compared to the electromagnetic forces. But there may also be a problem here. Since the electromagnetic field is just another form of energy or matter, wouldn’t that feed the mBH and lead to its growth?
The keeping-it-from-growing part might be the tricky part in such a scenario. It turns out that even in this scenario, the growth rate, or accretion rate as scientists call it, would be extremly slow, i.e. in the billions of years.

Thankfully, scientist have come up with their own assesments of the likelihood and the impact of such mBH creation scenarios at low TeV scales. One treatise is here.

How to Shine Light Through Walls

What if you could shine a light at a massive wall and see the signal on the other side of it? That could be very useful for passing messages through massive object, i.e. you could be morsing through walls. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work since massive objects block photons, or do they?

Apparently, researchers at DESY came up with a strange sounding, but intriguing concept. The researchers used ‘hidden photons’ which are – so far – hypothetical particles predicted to exist in the supersymmetric extension of the standard model.

Now, hold on, you will say, not so fast. What is the standard model anyway and why does it need supersymmetric extensions?

The standard model in particle physics is a theory that postulates elementary particles and describes the way they interact with each other. Those interactions are also called fundamental forces. Actually, the standard model only describes three out of four known fundamental forces, i.e. gravity is not part of the standard model.

The elementary particles postulated by the theory have been experimentally confirmed (except one: the Higgs boson) to exist and make up all visible matter in the universe. So for example the theory includes electrons, photons, quarks, etc. Note that the proton or neutron are composite particles (composed of three quarks) and are not considered elementary particles.

Now, the standard model has certain things that are lacking and what physicists normally do when things don’t quite add up, they invent new stuff that makes things add-up.

So it is with supersymmetry, or the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) as it is called. This theory requires the doubling of the know elementary particles, each know particle gets is supersymmetric partner.

So, in this context the photon gets its (hidden) partner, the hidden photon. This particle is entirely hypothetical and has not been observed anywhere – at least not knowingly. There is some hope that it might show up in experiments in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN.

Now back to the photon-through-walls thing.

Andreas Ringwald, the researcher at DESY, and his colleagues came up with a proof that if this hidden photon exists. It can be used to send messages through massive objects, as this hidden photon would need to have some rather interesting properties, namely they probably have a tiny mass (the photon has none) and would not interact with charged particles in conventional matter. Hidden photons could thus pass through even the densest materials.

The nifty thing about them is, that they are thought to be able to oscillate into normal photons and back, but they only do that in vacuum.

So Ringwald and his colleagues came up with a possibility and a proof that devices could be built that can send messages through ‘walls’ as thick as the diameter of the Earth, in fact they postulate that it would be possible with current technologies to send messages right through the Earth, unfortunately the ‘bandwidth’ would currently be limited to 1 bit/s (one bit per second).

There is an article on this phenomenon on the New Scientist website. The scientific work of Ringwald and colleagues can be found here (pdf).

Four Hurricane Names Retired From List of Storms

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration  (NOAA) announced on May 1 2009 that the names Gustav, Ike and Paloma for the Atlantic as well as Alma in the North Pacific will not be used again. According the the press release they were up for re-use in 2014.

That raises some interesting question. Where is the list and how does it work? Here is what I found. The NOAA Site explains it the following way:

Since 1953, Atlantic tropical storms have been named from lists originated by the National Hurricane Center. They are now maintained and updated by an international committee of the World Meteorological Organization. The original name lists featured only women’s names. In 1979, men’s names were introduced and they alternate with the women’s names. Six lists are used in rotation. Thus, the 2009 list will be used again in 2015.

The only time that there is a change in the list is if a storm is so deadly or costly that the future use of its name on a different storm would be inappropriate for reasons of sensitivity. If that occurs, then at an annual meeting by the WMO committee (called primarily to discuss many other issues) the offending name is stricken from the list and another name is selected to replace it.

Apparently this is what happened here. This has happened several times before, by the way, according to this list.

This leads me to the question of how this naming came about anyway. NOAA is great they can not only predict the weather and administrate it, they can also explain why things are as they are. NOAA gives the following explanation

as to the reasons why hurricanes are named:Experience shows that the use of short, distinctive names in written as well as spoken communications is quicker and less subject to error than the older, more cumbersome latitude-longitude identification methods. These advantages are especially important in exchanging detailed storm information between hundreds of widely scattered stations, coastal bases, and ships at sea.

I think that are good reasons, but why female and male names? Of course, NOAA answers that as well:

In 1953, the United States abandoned a confusing two-year old plan to name storms by a phonetic alphabet (Able, Baker, Charlie) when a new, international phonetic alphabet was introduced. That year, the United States began using female names for storms.

The practice of naming hurricanes solely after women came to an end in 1978 when men’s and women’s names were included in the Eastern North Pacific storm lists. In 1979, male and female names were included in lists for the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico.

That was very kind of them not to pin these sometimes destructive things exclusively with female names. I guess NOAA wasn’t an equal opportunity employer back then.

The authoritative list of names is now maintained by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) which is part of the UN and can be found here and it’s not easy to change the names on the list in case your interested for branding and sponsoring purposes.

Solar flares and the power grid

An article in the British Daily Mail online newspaper recently got my attention. It spoke about the dangers of solar storms, also known as solar flares.  It says in part

Labour former minister Graham Stringer said Britain should be prepared for a repeat of the solar storm of 1859, which hit Earth and paralysed much of the telegraph system.
In a Commons motion, Mr Stringer said such an event could now ‘knock out the National Grid, which would lead to a loss of water supply, transport and food and therefore create a national emergency’.
The so-called ‘Carrington event’ was a magnetic storm that struck Earth in 1859 and caused the failure of telegraph systems all over Europe and North America. Auroras were reportedly seen as far south as Florida. Now a report funded by NASA claims such a storm today would lead to ‘planetary disaster.’

Read the full Daily Mail article here. They didn’t give a link but they probably meant this article on the NASA website. NASA quotes the full 132-page report, which can be read online or downloaded here, as

The problem begins with the electric power grid. “Electric power is modern society’s cornerstone technology on which virtually all other infrastructures and services depend,” the report notes. Yet it is particularly vulnerable to bad space weather. Ground currents induced during geomagnetic storms can actually melt the copper windings of transformers at the heart of many power distribution systems. Sprawling power lines act like antennas, picking up the currents and spreading the problem over a wide area. The most famous geomagnetic power outage happened during a space storm in March 1989 when six million people in Quebec lost power for 9 hours.

I highly recommend reading the article if not the report. It is indeed chilling to realize that almost everything in our modern society depends on electricity being available. It is not just web, e-mail and iPhone that will go poof. Lighting in your home, cooking your meals, showering, washing your clothes, cooling and freezing food and above all the water you are drinking. This might be gone almost overnight.

So what can be done about it? The report points out that the “[g]round currents induced during geomagnetic storms can actually melt the copper windings of transformers at the heart of many power distribution systems” it further notes in Chapter 7 that

the effects on these interdependent infrastructures could persist for multiple years, with a potential for significant societal impacts and with economic costs that could be measurable in the several-trillion-dollars-per-year range.
Electric   power   grids,   a   national   critical   infrastructure,   continue   to   become   more   vulnerable   to   disruption from geomagnetic storms. For example, the evolution of open access on the transmission system has fostered the transport of large amounts of energy across the power system in order to maximize the economic benefit of delivering the lowest-cost energy to areas of demand. The magnitude of power transfers has grown, and the risk is that the increased level of transfers, coupled with multiple equipment failures, could worsen the impacts of a storm event.

It is then a question of policy and being prepared which clearly the utility companies have not and are not. They don’t have the equipment to deal with GICs (geomagnetically induced currents). As the report points out, the economic model under which utilities operate actually aggravates the problem. The solution could be as easy as installing supplemental transformer neutral ground resistors which would be relatively inexpensive, has low engineering trade-offs, and could produce 60-70 percent reductions of GIC levels for storms of all sizes, according to the report.

This could be a stimulus project. Especially if you think about the fact that the grid needs to be modernized and upgraded anyway because it will lack the capacity to deal with all the e-Cars that will have to be plugged in overnight…