Atomic Nerds

All right, I was going to work up a whole thing explaining how luddites were the bane of all reality, that people who cry “The sky is falling” simply because they can’t follow the math required to show why the sky is staying exactly where it has been for the last few decades are just so precious and wonderful that they should be sterilized and prevented from voting, but fuck it. I’m too tired for that shit, so I’m just going to cut to the chase.

As the folks at Gizmodo helpfuly pointed out: Hey Morons! CERN is not going to destroy the earth, morons!

Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up*. I know a lot of folks have heard how size doesn’t matter. I would like to show otherwise.

There is a very simple equation to determine the radius of the event horizon of a black hole:
Radius = (2*G*M)/C^2

M is the mass of the object forming the black hole in kilograms. C is the speed of light in meters per second. G is a funny number known more formally as Newton’s Gravitational Constant.

Let’s just go hog wild and assume that rather than colliding sub-atomic particles, CERN is going to collide bowling balls. Let’s be even more generous and assume that both bowling balls are entirely consumed in a perfect collision and combine to form a black hole. I like round, easy to work with numbers, so let’s say each bowling ball weighs 5 kilograms (11 lbs), giving us a 10kg black hole (those of you in the peanut gallery who have some idea where this is going, please keep the giggles to yourselves).

The official speed of light is the mysterious number C. Translated, that works out to 299,792,458 meters per second. Amazingly, it isn’t even anything funky like “meters per second squared” like you get for the wildly confusing realm of acceleration. Nope, just plain ‘ol linear meters-traveled-in-one-second velocity. Now because that number is unattractive and doesn’t look good in a cocktail dress, we’re going to call that an even 300 million m/s. If you are bad at math and need someone to explain to you why it is acceptable to discard 207,542 meters per second (which for trivia’s sake would be mach 605 at sea level) I suggest you either show this to your physics teacher, who will then probably beat your ass for your anti-CERN Chicken Little bullshit, or give up now.

If you are afraid that CERN will destroy the world with black holes, there is no fucking way I am going to explain specifically what G is. I will instead offer a more suitable-for-luddites explanation: G is what happens when you take a “Xena: Warrior Princess” fanfic and combine it with five jars of peanut butter while on a tropical rainforest vacation to observe the rare and endangered linoleum aardvark. G is 6.672 x 10^-11 N*m^2/kg^2. If you are not afraid of CERN, G is a constant that makes calculations involving gravity (such as you might find in things involving black holes, or planetary orbits, etc), for lack of a more elegant summation, Just Work. The math isn’t that hard to follow, but it’s way more than I want to cover here. If you want to look it up, I applaud you whole heartedly. Moving on.

Now plugging everything into our equation, we find that the radius of a black hole made with two 5kg bowling balls will be (2 x 6.6e-11N*m^2/kg^2 x 10kg) / (3e9 m/s)^2. The radius (that’s halfway across the widest part of a circle, just to refresh) of a black hole caused by 10kg will thus be 1.46×10^-28 meters, or .000000000000000000000000000146 meters.

That’s pretty damn small. Now we don’t know exactly the radius of a proton for reasons that would boggle the Anti-CERN luddite even more than this black hole nonsense, but we can peg the bastard somewhere between 1.5×10^-15 and 1.5×10^-18 meters. That means that the radius of a proton, a damned large sub-atomic particle, is about TEN BILLION times larger than the radius of a black hole created by slamming two BOWLING BALLS together.

Let me restate that for clarity.

A PROTON is TEN BILLION TIMES LARGER than a black hole formed by two BOWLING BALLS.

The radius of the earth is about 6.3×10^6 meters. That means the radius of the earth is 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times larger than the radius of a black hole created very improbably with 10kg worth of bowling balls.

Now I don’t live in Geneva, or have a PostHoleDigger, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the mass of a hadron or two is just a skosh less than 10kg. In fact, a hadron will be less than 1×10^-10 kg. Hell, a proton is 1.67×10^-27kg, and as I said, in sub-atomic terms a proton is (this is technical, bear with me) Fucking Huge. Normal physics may break down inside the event horizon of a black hole, but outside that horizon it’s just one big-ass dense sphere in the best case math. Even ignoring the fact that a black hole can “eat” itself to death given enough mass or energy (they’re interchangable, remember? Wow, isn’t physics fun?) the fact of the matter is that any black holes created by CERN will be so small as to look tiny even next to the sum total of the Democratic Party’s credibility on the notion that they support gun owners. I am unconcerned for the survival of the planet where the actions of CERN are involved.

Now at this point, I’m going to be generous. Rather than use the $500 promised by WeDontGetPhysics.com LHCConcerns.com for something frivolous like an anti-dragon gun, I will be more than happy to use that prize to fund a grant to provide one femtosecond’s worth of electricity to power CERN in the name of Atomic Nerds.

Class dismissed.

*It is late, it has been a week made entirely of Mondays, and I am tired. If I misplaced an order or three of magnitude on some of the scientific notation-to-English translations, or typo’d a few 0s, please forgive (and gently correct) me. If I made any major math errors, please point them out so I can scrub the egg from my face.

Posted Ranting, Science: we'll fuck you up |